Juniper and Polycom To Lower Video Conferencing Costs

Brian White, an analyst with Ticonderoga Securities, said the Juniper-Polycom deal will be a good one for both companies. It gives Juniper a video conferencing offering to go along with its networking products and further extends Polycom’s reach in the market.

“Juniper will need to offer a broader product portfolio to compete with Cisco, and today’s announcement is a good example of potentially more partnerships/alliances in the future,” White wrote in a research note. “Today’s announcement helps Juniper begin to fill a gap in its collaboration solution offering for the enterprise market. … In our view, Cisco is well ahead of its peers in the collaboration transition and Juniper is now more aggressively adding solutions through this alliance.”

The new partnership will include Juniper’s Junos Space network application platform, Junos operating system, MX Series 3D universal edge routers and SRX Series services gateways, which offer enterprise-level integrated routing and security. It also will involve Polycom’s telepresence systems and video communications infrastructure as well as its DMA (Distributed Media Application), which centralises call control and offers greater failover redundancy.

A key capability of DMA is that it can direct traffic over the network and more dynamically allocate bandwidth depending on demand, said Stevens and Dean Schoen, vice president of business development for Polycom’s Video Solutions Group.

If the application can fulfill the bandwidth demand, it will do so. If it can’t, it will alert the users, they said. That will save problems that arise today, where users may not get the bandwidth they need for their session, and the result is an inferior experience.

Without the ability to predict bandwidth capability, some service providers and enterprises are forced to overprovision bandwidth.

“This allows them not to overpay for bandwidth,” Schoen said.