“IMS is a complex architecture requiring a high level of implementation expertise,” said Tom Valovic, Program Director of VoIP infrastructure at IDC. “Although many of the more advanced applications of IMS are still evolving, early deployments will involve proven capabilities that intersect with many of the real-time multimedia collaboration tools associated with the emerging area of unified communications. Polycom recognises the importance of this trend and the need to respond to the growing momentum of both IMS and SIP in service provider networks.”

Polycom will deliver a comprehensive offering which focuses purely on the collaboration and conferencing markets. Based on its experience as the industry leader in voice, video and unified collaboration solutions, Polycom has designed its IMS architected products for the unique technological demands of high scale, high quality, multi-party voice, video conferencing and collaboration. The Polycom IMS architected products will include: a conferencing and collaboration optimised application server, an application development environment, an optimised conferencing media server, and multiple voice, video, and unified collaboration applications also based on SIP.

“With the proliferation of desktop video and multimedia enabled 3G devices, Polycom believes that the next generation of conferencing and collaboration services will be vastly different from yesterday’s pre-scheduled and attended audio and video conferencing,” said Joe Sigrist, Senior Vice-President and General Manager of Network Systems at Polycom. “Our IMS strategy is designed to assist our current service provider customers and an entirely new generation of service providers to rapidly design and deploy new applications that bring value to large enterprises, small businesses and consumers. Our approach ensures that service providers can migrate to next-generation applications and infrastructures affordably and intelligently, without extensive modification or forklift upgrades.”

Polycom’s IMS solutions will enable rapid feature development, scalability, fault tolerance, zero downtime upgrades, and design flexibility — all of which will allow service providers to create differentiated services that are completely transparent to the network, regardless of device and location. The Polycom solutions will enable on-demand environments where end-users can move easily and seamlessly between collaboration services and other services whenever and wherever they want. Service providers should be able to capitalise on new market opportunities when using Polycom’s IMS strategy.

Pricing and Availability

Polycom IMS-based infrastructure solutions are scheduled to be available in the first half of 2007. Pricing will be announced at that time.