Despite the growing popularity of videoconferencing in the
enterprise, HP on Wednesday revealed it sold its Visual
Collaboration assets along with its Halo system to Polycom for USD
89 million.
As part of the deal, Polycom said it will establish a strategic
relationship in which Polycom will serve as an exclusive partner to
HP for telepresence and certain video unified communications (UC)
systems, including both resale and internal HP deployments. The two
companies also have agreed to make Polycom's video applications
available for HP's webOS platform, which is the mobile operating
system that HP won when it acquired Palm in 2010 and will deploy in
a number of forthcoming smartphones and tablet computers.
The deal combines HP's networking scale and global reach with
Polycom's expertise in videoconferencing. HP is the world's largest
technology company based on revenue. The deal creates "a path for
Polycom and HP to offer customers an end-to-end UC solution with an
unparalleled user experience, interoperability, investment
protection, and ease of deployment," Andrew Miller, Polycom
president and CEO, said in a statement.
Forrester Research analyst Henry Dewing said his first reaction was
the deal was counterintuitive, since videoconferencing is becoming
more popular as part of an enterprise collaboration platform.
However, Dewing said the more he thought about it, the more it made
sense because in the enterprise, HP is more about the data center
while Polycom is more about the end user.
"HP's role in the industry is that of infrastructure provider and
not of end solution provider," said Dewing. To be sure, HP is big
on desktop and laptop computers in the enterprise, but its main
enterprise communications and collaboration play is running
Microsoft Lync for office communications on HP servers or running
Cisco Unified Communications Manager on HP servers. Going forward,
Polycom will distribute Visual Collaborations systems to run on,
presumably, HP servers.
Also notable, said Dewing, is HP selling its Halo high-definition
videoconferencing line to Polycom. Halo was introduced by HP at
about the same time Cisco introduced TelePresence for
videoconferencing with an image so high in resolution that people
on each end of a TelePresence meeting appear to be in the same room
even though they may be time zones apart. But Dewing said HP has
done relatively little to promote Halo.
"The marketing and selling has been a weak link in that
organization," he said, adding that Polycom may improve sales of
Halo because its channel partner network is focused on the
telecommunications sector while HP's is focused more on the
enterprise data center sector.
Polycom also announced the creation of the Open Visual
Communications Consortium (OVCC), which is intended to expand the
use of visual communications by improving interoperability between
different technology platforms and across multiple service
providers, including Verizon, AT&T, and overseas carriers such
as Orange, Telefonica, and Telstra.