Catching up with Polycom

Polycom’s made some news the past couple weeks in the audio and service provider space. Reaping the rewards of its acquisition of Voyant Technologies, Polycom rolled out to new offerings: Convene and MobileMeeting Instant Group Calling. Convene is a hardware platform that offers voice, video and web conferencing to service providers in a single box, based on Voyant’s OCI chassis with components from Polycom’s MGC MCU thrown into the mix. Convene will be available at the end of this month in the OCI 1440, which supports up to 1,344 T-1 ports.

MobileMeeting Instant Group Calling is targeted at wireless carriers and provides what its name implies, the ability to call a group of people with the click of a button. Users kick off a conference from a mobile phone or data device (i.e. BlackBerry) by selecting a pre-defined group of users. BlackBerry and other device users will be able to edit their lists directly from their mobile unit. The MobileMeeting server, installed at the service provider, connects all the listed users in a full-duplex call (meaning they can all talk at the same time.) Polycom is currently testing the technology with a number of carriers.