Polycom Inc. and Digium Inc. have announced a multi-year agreement to develop and market SIP-based telephony solutions for small and medium-sized businesses. The solutions would give customers an integrated, standards-based offering with simplified provisioning and broad support of Asterisk (News - Alert) telephony features on Polycom (News - Alert) phones as well as the delivery new features like Polycom’s HD voice quality.

Polycom’s SIP desktop and conference phones will be combined with Digium’s (News - Alert) Asterisk Business Edition as part of the solution. The open-source PBX (News - Alert) from Digium is a professional-grade version of Asterisk. The combined offering will give customers access to advanced telephony solutions, as well as more control and the ability to rapidly develop features and deploy new solutions. Polycom will also become the preferred VoIP phone provider for Digium solutions as part of the agreement.

Digium plans to modify the Asterisk GUI, Asterisk Business Edition application and Asterisk OS to integrate with Polycom’s line of SIP-based desktop and conference phones as part of the agreement. The integration will enable advanced features like shared line appearance, XML microbrowser plugins and Polycom HD voice. The companies also plan to work together on joint sales and marketing initiatives, and Polycom phones will be the exclusive VoIP phones in the Digium Asterisk Appliance Developer Kit.

“We look forward to expanding our offering and furthering our reach in the marketplace through this partnership with Polycom,” said Mark Spencer, president and CEO at Digium. “The interoperability between Asterisk Business Edition and Polycom SIP phones ensures flexibility and broad support for Asterisk telephony features.”

“Open source PBX's are gaining significant momentum in the market place because they are easy to deploy and they offer partners and customers the ability to use it as a development platform for customized solutions,” said Will Stofega, research manager, VoIP Services at IDC (News - Alert). “The combination of Polycom’s broad family of high quality desktop and conference phones and Digium's low-cost, feature-rich platform will deliver a strong integrated VoIP telephony solution to the SMB market.”

“The open source approach is an important part of the current IP PBX market and we want to support this community with the renowned voice quality and intuitive user interface of Polycom’s phones,” said Sunil Bhalla, senior vice president and general manager of voice communications at Polycom. “Through our co-development agreement, Polycom SIP phones will be easy to deploy and manage in a Digium Asterisk Business Edition environment and support the business telephony features to meet the needs of the SMB market.”

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Laura Stotler writes about IP Communications and related topics for TMCnet. She has covered VoIP and related technologies for seven years, contributing to Internet Telephony magazine and TMCnet, and as a freelance writer. To see more articles, please visit: Laura Stotler’s columnist page.