Polycom

Polycom's partner programme certified the people who positioned and installed its room and desktop video systems: the sales track covered the portfolio and its fit to a customer's rooms and network, the technical track the endpoint itself, its registration to the call-control platform, the bandwidth it needs and the network behaviour of real-time video. For an integrator whose other lines were switching and firewalls, that network behaviour was the point of contact: a video call is the application that exposes jitter, loss and an untested quality-of-service design faster than anything else on the estate, and the person who had built the network was the right one to make the call survive it.

Two credentials with their dates, and the context that produced them. The portfolio documents of the time do not describe Polycom deployments by name, and this chapter does not invent them: the tracks were enablement for the integrator's communications line, taken in the same months as the Avaya credentials and the Extreme deployments told elsewhere in the record. The company's own story, from the first SoundStation of 1992 through Plantronics and Poly to HP, is on its industry page.