On January 25, 2010, Polycom announced an alliance with Juniper, promising to improve the user experience.
The press release declares that “the yet-to-be-delivered intelligent service provider solution enables assured-quality managed video services over a converged network. It’s to be anchored by dynamic signaling between the Juniper network resource control platform and the Polycom video call control system.”
This sounds so much like DiffServ tagging in a converged network. From my experience, if you can throw more bandwidth at a problem or implement some network-wide complicated feature, the bandwidth wins every time. This is one of those moments.
Juniper is a leader in carrier IP networking and competes quite successfully against Cisco. Polycom needs to bolster its position in enterprise video conferencing and especially in telepresence as Cisco and TANDBERG merge.
As far as I can tell, this is an alliance to solve a business problem not a customer problem. Let’s wait for customers lining up for this.
