Polycom, Glowpoint team on business-to-business video

Polycom and Glowpoint announced today that they are teaming up to enable businesses using Polycom telecom equipment to interconnect their telepresence services across carrier networks. The idea, says John Bartlett, a consultant with the Polycom Service Division, is to make videoconferencing simpler by giving businesses an easy way to communicate with customers, suppliers and others, no matter who their telecom service provider is.

Glowpoint provides the Telepresence interExchange Network (TEN) which allows businesses using Polycom's standards-based telepresence and video conferencing systems to connect to one another, even if they are using different videoconferencing service providers, said Howard Reingold, director of product management for Glowpoint. Polycom's direct salespeople and sales channels will now be working to sell subscriptions to Glowpoint's TEN as well.

"Ten years ago, all of videoconferencing was supported by ISDN, which was the public network, and we had business-to-business videoconferencing," Bartlett said. "We moved to IP for a lot of good reasons, but what happened as a result was that we lost those business-to-business connections. Telepresence today is largely contained within the enterprise."

Ease of use

By allowing businesses to use TEN to make telepresence and videoconferencing calls across carrier networks, Polycom and Glowpoint expect to make video services more valuable to businesses and therefore drive up usage. The Glowpoint TEN is a network interconnect facility that enables secure business-to-business videoconferencing with guaranteed bandwidth and quality of service.

True videoconferencing interconnectivity will require greater action by telecom service providers, said Brad Shimmin, analyst with Current Analysis, but using the Glowpoint exchange is a start.

"It will be the service providers that make this happen," Shimmin said. "This is a good push that will help make this exchange workable for enough people. It speaks to Polycom's go-to-market strategy, which is based on interconnectivity."

Polycom's Bartlett admits there is reluctance among service providers to deliver interoperable video services.