Polycom Promotes Easier, More Pervasive Video in the Enterprise

Polycom continues to do its part to make video conferencing as integral to communications as voice. Today, the company announced thePolycom Converged Management Application (CMA)and CMA Desktop. Polycom CMA lets Polycom video devices (desktop, group and telepresence systems) share presence information as a part of user contact lists; users can then just click on a name to launch a call to the appropriate endpoint, which will have been provisioned by an IT administrator in advance. CMA Desktop supports high definition (HD) video, voice and content while scaling to thousands of users across an organization.Polycom says that in the future, the products will deliverenhanced integration with UC applications fromAvaya, IBM, Microsoft and Nortel.HD on the desktop is unproven today, butwith CMA Desktop Polycom joins other vendors in its support for the standard (Tandberg announced similar news last month). More important for now is the better management that comes with an integrated desktop system: with it, IT staffers will get improved (or entirely new) control over network managementand bandwidth usage.