CIOIN

Agreement reflects companies' shared commitment to open, standards-based unified communications

Avaya and Polycom, Inc. [Nasdaq: PLCM], are expanding their existing relationship and will jointly develop and market integrated video, voice and collaboration solutions. The companies plan to deliver fully integrated, end-to-end unified communications (UC) solutions that use the Avaya Aura^TM Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based platform and the Polycom Open Collaboration Network strategy.

The planned joint solutions will provide Polycom's full range of voice and video systems integrated with Avaya Aura delivering real-time collaboration to customers. Avaya Aura will enable companies to administer, schedule and manage the joint solutions in a single, consistent manner, and control bandwidth to support a superior user experience and optimal deployment of network resources.

The expanded partnership supports Avaya Aura as a fundamental control point for managing and delivering communications across organisations.

"Companies are the real winners in the unified communications market because UC can save time, money and other valuable resources," said Roopam Jain, principal analyst, Frost & Sullivan. "As more and more companies flesh out and execute on their UC strategies, interoperability and standards such as SIP are critical."

Jain added, "Because every UC deployment has unique requirements, standards-based solutions are key. It's encouraging to see Avaya and Polycom team to enable this type of open collaboration and feature-rich, purpose-built solutions."

"The Avaya Aura platform enables our customers to integrate, manage and use communications in new ways to improve business performance," said Alan Baratz, senior vice president and president, Global Communications Solutions, Avaya. "By adopting the Avaya Aura platform, Polycom products will benefit from the seamless interoperability it offers. Together we'll offer customers a choice of collaboration solutions with the flexibility and functionality they require."

"We continue to deliver on the Polycom Open Collaboration Network strategy, and Avaya is leading the charge in adopting open standards as the core for its business communications platform," said Andy Miller, Polycom executive vice president of Global Field Operations. "Avaya is a significant global presence across multiple industries. These existing relationships give us an excellent opportunity to introduce customers to our new UC solutions."

The Avaya Aura platform simplifies existing voice and video communica¬tions architectures, including the ability to integrate communications across multi-vendor networks, to deliver business communi¬cations with more capabilities, fewer costs and less complexity. The combined Avaya and Polycom offers will support customers who want to maintain their existing communications investments as they adopt new capabilities and solutions.