**Editor’s Note: Please click here for a look back at the biggest channel-impacting mergers and acquisitions from 2017.**
The new year has brought one acquisition after another involving companies that do business in the channel, with the latest being Polycom‘s purchase of Obihai Technology, a provider of VoIP audio solutions based in Silicon Valley.
Obihai develops software and hardware for VoIP endpoints. Financial details regarding the acquisition weren’t disclosed. It is expected to close early this quarter.
Polycom’s Andre Reid
Andre Reid, Polycom’s senior director of product management, tells Channel Partners the acquisition creates new opportunities for Polycom and its partners alike as the deal brings both an “extremely talented development team and a highly innovative technology stack.”
“Both of these will allow Polycom to bring service provider and channel partners a broader portfolio of voice endpoints (analog telephone adapters (ATAs), multiport gateways and IP phones today), as well as a robust cloud service offer for provisioning, management and analytics for those endpoints,” he said. “In addition to the expanded portfolio, Polycom will be even better equipped to respond to the ever-changing UC landscape, allowing both Polycom and our partners to continue to lead as the industry evolves.”
Obihai has a proven track record of moving quickly to address market demand, as well as identifying and addressing underserved market needs, Reid said.
“Welcoming Obihai into the Polycom family will allow us to more easily customize our portfolio for future partner expansion into new service providers, channels and markets,” he said. “The addition of the Obihai cloud-service solution will allow Polycom and our partners to reduce the overall total cost of deployment, ownership and troubleshooting, as well as better allowing our partners to scale, giving us, together, a huge competitive advantage. We are looking beyond feature and datasheet comparisons to provide real and recognizable value to our partners.”
Obihai, through its partners, built its business to where it is today and Polycom plans to continue to support and invest in those partners and relationships, Reid said.
“Polycom is a proven leader for delivering products with outstanding audio quality and universal interoperability in the open-standard SIP market for VoIP endpoints,” said Jan Fandrianto, Obihai’s founder and CEO. “When combined with Polycom, Obihai’s product and cloud-services engineering expertise will be a powerful advantage for Polycom’s partners and their customers in an increasingly competitive market.”
Polycom is among the leaders in the telepresence equipment market.
