Deepening its reach into the middle to low end of the videoconferencing market, Cisco’s (CSCO) acquisition of Tandberg, announced today, is either a milestone that will widen acceptance and adoption of the technology, or a blow to interoperability that will limit its ultimate spread. Needless to say, which of those views you hold depends largely on whether you’re a Cisco competitor or not.
The Tandberg deal “gives Cisco the technical chops necessary to back up its longstanding marketing claims regarding interoperability (end-points to service providers) and breadth of coverage (board room to desktop),” remarked Bradley Shimmin, principal analyst for collaboration and conferencing at research firm Current Analysis.
Cisco made a splash with its introduction of its elaborate, room-sized TelePresence systems three years ago, and has boasted that such high-definition, life-sized conferencing technology enables new forms of communication and collaboration with customers, colleagues, and partners. Besides being costly, though, the first generation of Cisco TelePresence was almost entirely proprietary. Cisco has been at pains to deliver, and tout, systems that can interoperate with other vendors’ models (and include less pricey options), but competitors and some enterprises still complained that conference sessions linking Cisco TelePresence rooms to, say, Tandberg or Polycom (PLCM) systems were lower quality and complex to set up. While Norwegian vendor Tandberg has taken a more neutral stance, neither it nor Cisco have participated in recent interoperability events, points out Stefan Karapetkov, emerging technologies director at Polycom.
Such concerns are potentially existential for Polycom, which now faces a combined competitor with “a much stronger balance sheet, a much broader portfolio and a much deeper technological foundation,” commented Shimmin.
Analysts had mixed responses on how the deal will ultimately affect Polycom, some noting that it could see some added opportunity from customers reluctant to sign single-vendor deals, and others predicting Polycom’s market share will decline. Polycom shares lost almost 4.5 percent of their value today.
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