Polycom Continues SIP Endpoint Success

Sometime in your life, you have likely used a Polycom telephone or video conferencing system. Once known for their conferencing systems, Polycom expanded into high-fidelity teleconferencing products, and has now proven themselves in the field of IP telephones. Especially in the SIP-centric IP-PBX market, Polycom has made a significant statement. The SoundPoint IP series has become the ‘de-facto standard’ for many IP-PBX and UC system vendors. With Digium|Switchvox, Fonality, and many other IP Centrex providers supporting the SoundPoint IP series, interoperability is definitely present with Polycom’s products from platform to platform. What has made Polycom especially successful in the SIP endpoint market? In my opinion, there are a few key factors to the success of any endpoint. First, hardware build quality is extremely important. There are simply a lot of ‘junk’ devices out there that only add confusion and a poor end user experience. Sure, these devices may cost less in the short-term, but will likely add exponentially to that cost through user frustration and hardware failure. Second, configurability and centralized provisioning is essential. The entire SoundPoint IP series offers extremely flexible provisioning through TFTP, HTTP, or FTP, and also rapid deployment through this boot-server model. Many UC server and IP-PBX vendors require control over the minute details in any endpoint in order to seamlessly provide an advanced feature set to the user. Polycom’s endpoint configuration files are indeed very detailed and long, but offer granular control over even the smallest details. Polycom continues to develop its SoundPoint IP series with new endpoints, including those with high-resolution color displays, attendant consoles, and XML-based applications. In the next few weeks, I hope to take a look at some of the new Polycom products and post my findings here. In addition, Polycom’s acquisition of SpectraLink will promise new advancements in the wireless SIP endpoint markets. Are you using Polycom IP endpoints in your organization? If so, I’d love to hear from you!