CTIA: Polycom’s mobile strategy expands to the iPad

Polycom may be known for its closed enterprise networks composed of proprietary video conferencing end points and bridges, but today at CTIA Enterprise & Applications it revealed plans to open up, accelerating its mobile strategy and even indicating that it would interoperate with consumer video and social media platforms like Skype and Google+.

The big news, however, was its announcement yesterday of a video conferencing client for the iPad 2, which can effectively turn any new Apple tablet into a end point on a corporate video collaboration network. Polycom’s tablet strategy has focused on striking deals with vendor partners for specific tablets, allowing it to integrate its technology down the hardware layer of the device (CP: Building a better video chat). Polycom had already struck deals with Motorola and Samsung to support Polycom technology in the Xoom and Galaxy Tab, but with the iPhone deal, Polycom’s video platform now extends to the most popular tablet OS in the world.

However, Polycom deviated from its own strategy to snare the iPad. Polycom wasn’t granted access to any layer of iPad below the operating system and therefore has to run its client without hardware acceleration. The difference was pronounced in the demo Polycom gave at CTIA’s keynote session, in which four Polycom executives in different areas of the country hosted a video collaboration session using a Xoom, a Tab 10.1, an iPad 2 and one of Polycom’s traditional video endpoints. The iPad stream wasn’t as high resolution and had a significant delay. Part of the issue might have been the iPad’s lack of 4G connectivity, while both the Tab and Xoom support LTE. But Polycom officials said all three tablets were connected via LTE—the iPad presumably through a 4G hotspot.

While the client is a free download from the Android Market and the iTunes store, I’ts designed to work with Polycom’s video infrastructure. Tablet owners can register their devices as end-points on their corporate networks, after which they can access the full capabilities of the network. Polycom, though, is allowing tablet owners to use the client for free over Wi-Fi. They can’t connect to a Polycom video conference but they can use it to establish peer-to-peer HD video chat calls as long as both tablets are on the same wireless LAN. That’s hardly a useful service for consumers, but tablet users on far-ranging corporate users could get a lot of mileage out of the app.