Ongoing coverage of VoiceCon San Francisco 2009
WEDNESDAY HIGHLIGHTS
* Siemens' Straton on Nortel
* Polycom co-founder on "chameleon" devices (and Polycom's latest offering)
* VoiceCon TV: Watch live-streamed sessions and archived interviews and sessions
INFORMATION WEEK COVERAGE:
* Siemens Brings Twitter To OpenScape
* DAY TWO COVERAGE: Click here
* DAY ONE COVERAGE: Click here
Ongoing coverage of VoiceCon San Francisco 2009
WEDNESDAY HIGHLIGHTS
* Siemens' Straton on Nortel
* Polycom co-founder on "chameleon" devices (and Polycom's latest offering)
* VoiceCon TV: Watch live-streamed sessions and archived interviews and sessions
INFORMATION WEEK COVERAGE:
* Siemens Brings Twitter To OpenScape
* DAY TWO COVERAGE: Click here
* DAY ONE COVERAGE: Click here
I had a chance to talk with Siemens' Mark Straton after his Wednesday keynote, and so I took the opportunity to ask him about the Nortel auction. You'll remember that the auction to acquire Nortel Enterprise Solutions pitted Avaya against Siemens, and Avaya submitted the winning bid of $900 million
"Nortel was an opportunity that came up," Mark said. "You had to look at it and had to go for it, so we went for it." He said Avaya is facing an "integration headache" (and Siemens would have as well, he added), and he predicted that Avaya will lose a significant amount of the Nortel base.
Now that the Nortel opportunity is passed, "We have to execute better and we have to make some moves," Straton said, though he declined to be more specific.
He added that Siemens"made money this year" despite the difficult economy, and "we are winning a lot of new business" in the U.S. and globally.
***
Next page: Polycom on the future of the...phone?
In yesterday's opening keynote, Dr. Alan Baratz of Avaya talked about the company's vision for a "chameleon" desktop device, a computing device that could run multiple types of real-time applications as determined by software load (hence chameleon).
I ran that vision by Jeff Rodman, co-founder and CTO of voice communications at Polycom. Who better?
Jeff agreed with the basic premise. "I think we're in harmony," he said. The question isn't, he said, is the phone going away; "The question is, What is the phone becoming?"
You need "a thing you can turn to that you can always count on," Rodman said. "You're always going to need a 5-nines something." The alternative--presumably running a softphone on a PC, means you decide between, "A spreadsheet, a Powerpoint or a 911 call."
Polycom used VoiceCon San Francisco to announce the latest version of its contribution to this blurring of the line between different types of desktop real-time communications devices--what it calls "business media phones." The VVX1500 can function as a high-end executive phone and a "personal videoconferencing endpoint." The 7-inch color screen can display video in a smaller window that can be maximized to fill the entire screen, and a series of hard keys on the phone set can invoke functions including video and do not disturb at the push of a single button.
The new feature, according to Tim Yankey of Polycom, is that the VVX1500 D release offers a dual software stack, SIP and H.323. The SIP stack controls telephony on the device, which H.323 is the video protocol; adding an H.323 stack lets the device work seamlessly with a company's installed H.323 videoconferencing systems.
The device lists for $1,099 with just the SIP stack (which runs both telephony and video on this model); and $1,199 for the dual SIP/H.323 stack. street prices tend to be in the $700-$800 range, Yankey added.
Polycom also announced a new phone for use with Microsoft OCS/Communicator. The CX300 aims at the mid-market between the stripped-down "Tanjay"-design phones, which lack a keypad, and the high end versions, which include a color screen that runs Office Communicator clients right on the phone.
The CX300 not only has the keypad while lacking a screen, it doesn't look like any other phone you've seen--while not looking quite as offbeat (and off-kilter) as the original Tanjay phones The hole in the receiver of the CX300 is actually there for a reason, Tim Yankey explained. The speaker is directly underneath the receiver, and so the hole lets optimal sound come through when you're on speakerphone.
The CX300 lists for $169.
