It may be a market dominated by Cisco, but its smaller rival Juniper still sees an opportunity. The networking firm has unveiled a partnership with Polycom to deliver telepresence to the enterprise market as a managed service.
With demand for video rising around the world, the two companies see their partnership putting a unique stamp on the burgeoning telepresence market. Enterprise Networking Planet takes a look at the offering, which couples the application with the network.
The market for high-end video conferencing, known as telepresence, is heating up this week. Networking vendor Juniper (NYSE: JNPR) and video conferencing vendor Polycom (NASDAQ: PLCM) are teaming up in a new joint effort to help service providers effectively deliver telepresence as a managed service.
The new partnership will provide a new competitor to rival Cisco and its telepresence offerings. At stake is a growth market for visual communication solutions, which Gartner has forecast to reach $8.6 billion by 2013.
“As enterprises look at broadly deploying video across the globe, some will not want to undertake the rollout on their own, instead they will look to service providers to deliver video as a managed service,” Dean Schoen, vice president of strategic alliances at Polycom, told InternetNews.com. “The increasing adoption of high-definition telepresence means there are some bandwidth implications, and all of this really provides an opportunity for service providers to look at managed video services, as well as forward-looking at how to integrate with video with a unified communications offer, increasing the use and adoption of video services — not just as standalone, but as part of an integrated application.”
The Juniper-Polycom partnership will leverage existing hardware from both vendors as well as providing a new level of integration that previously did not exist between the platforms. On the Juniper side, the hardware includes the SRX service gateways and MX Edge routers. From Polycom, the joint solution will leverage Polycom telepresence systems as well as the Polycom Distributed Media Application (DMA), which is a conferencing control and quality solution.
