Polycom adds support for AT&T Telepresence video collaboration tools
Polycom and AT&T have announced that they are working together to integrate more of their enterprise collaboration services to extend business-to-business communications and connectivity.
Essentially, Polycom's RealPresence video tools are now certified and available for AT&T Telepresence Solution (ATS), a hosted video collaboration offering. The mobile version of RealPresence will also work with AT&T's Telepresence platform so that smartphone and tablet users can join AT&T video calls anywhere so long as they are connected to the Internet -- even if they're not registered with AT&T in the first place.
Some of the Polycom products that will now support AT&T Telepresence range from free-standing, video immersive conference rooms to desktop platforms and small business environments for individual and small group communications.
Crafted in response to "huge customer demand," Polycom says that the partnership with AT&T is designed to offer more choices to customers so that they can avoid vendor lock-in while being able to collaborate via HD video, regardless of device, distance, and underlying technologies.
Polycom executives repeatedly stress their support for an open ecosystem for video collaboration rings of Polycom's announcements earlier this week . During a media presentation surrounding new open APIs for its RealPresence platform at the company's new San Jose headquarters earlier this month, Sudhakar Ramakrishna, president of products and services for Polycom, asserted that "video collaboration is becoming more and more ubiquitous."
Polycom execs stressed that while they obviously want enterprises to be using its solutions, they don't want customers to be worried about what kind of technology might be used by the colleagues they are calling on the other end of the line.
AT&T also boasts that it is the first service provider to leverage Polycom's open standards-based interoperability solutions to deliver cloud-based video that works with non-standard Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP) systems.
The compatible Polycom and AT&T solutions are available starting today through the ATS-hosted service in 80 countries.