Polycom, Glowpoint team on business-to-business video

"It's a complex task with some technical challenges," Bartlett said. "There is competition – global carriers have all recognized the value to them of videoconferencing, which is that it drives a lot of bandwidth. The wide area network support enterprises need for high-definition video or telepresence means revenue to carriers, and it's high-quality bandwidth at high classification with quality of service, which means higher margins. Today they see connecting to another carrier as giving away business. It's really a chicken-and-egg problem – longer term, video will increase in its use, and everyone will benefit from that, including vendors and carriers – but we have to get there. What we need is a catalyst, and we believe this solution is that catalyst, a way to enable business-to-business videoconferencing so enterprises get a taste of it and push on carriers to do this."

Competitive boost

Polycom is also hoping to gain competitive advantage over rivals such as Tandberg and particularly Cisco, which is less engaged in interoperability efforts, said analyst Shimmin.

"This works well for Polycom because Glowpoint has a lot of their equipment and a lot of expertise, but there is no reason other vendors like Tandberg can't step up and say the same thing," Shimmin said. "For any exchange to be successful, you need all the service provider players and all vendors working together."

More than 650 organizations already use TEN, which also connects to many public videoconferencing rooms and can connect to ISDN-based end points as well, Reingold said. The exchange facilitates network address translation and firewall traversal, two persistent problems for business-to-business videoconferencing in the IP world.