Vendor lineage
Polycom - the triangle on every conference table
The company that put a triangular speakerphone on every conference table, bought by a headset maker, renamed, and bought again by HP.
Polycom was co-founded in 1990 by Brian L. Hinman and Jeffrey Rodman, colleagues from PictureTel, and moved from San Francisco to San Jose soon after. Its first product, in 1992, was the SoundStation: a triangular conference speakerphone with full-duplex audio, which is to say both ends could talk at once without the line clipping, and the shape became the emblem of a meeting room for a quarter of a century. The company grew from audio into video and was, for most of the 2000s and 2010s, the reference name in conference endpoints.
The video line came by acquisition and then by its own engineering. In January 1998 Polycom bought ViaVideo for 54 million dollars and with it the set-top video unit that became the ViewStation; in October 2001 it acquired PictureTel, the company its own founders had left. RealPresence followed, first as a desktop client and then as room systems, including the immersive RealPresence Experience of 2006. In 2017 the company had revenues of 1.1 billion dollars.
The ownership chain is the part that makes the card. In April 2016 Mitel agreed to buy Polycom for 1.96 billion dollars; in July the deal was dropped for an all-cash offer from Siris Capital, a New York private-equity firm, which took the company private for 1.7 billion. On 28 March 2018 Plantronics, the Santa Cruz headset maker, announced it would buy Polycom for about 2 billion dollars, and completed the acquisition on 2 July 2018: 1.638 billion dollars in cash and 6.352 million Plantronics shares. In 2019 the combined company renamed itself Poly.
Three years later it was bought again. HP announced the acquisition of Poly on 28 March 2022 and completed it on 29 August 2022, an all-cash transaction at 40 dollars a share, an enterprise value of about 3.3 billion dollars including Poly's net debt, describing Poly as video conferencing, cameras, headsets, voice and software. The Polycom name survives as a line in HP's catalogue and, on this site, as two 2014 credentials whose issuer no longer exists.
Why it belongs in a networking record: a video call is the application that exposes a badly built network fastest. Jitter, loss and a quality-of-service design that was never tested show up on a Polycom screen before they show up anywhere else, which is why an integrator's network engineer ended up certified on its endpoints.
This company no longer trades under this name. Now part of Poly, an HP product line (formerly Polycom and Plantronics).
- Wikipedia: Polycom - co-founded in 1990 by Brian L. Hinman and Jeffrey Rodman, colleagues at PictureTel; started in San Francisco and soon moved to San Jose; first product the SoundStation in 1992, a triangular speakerphone with full-duplex audio; ViaVideo acquired in January 1998 for $54 million; PictureTel acquired in October 2001; the RealPresence Experience of 2006; the April 2016 Mitel agreement at $1.96 billion dropped in July 2016 for Siris Capital's all-cash offer of $1.7 billion; revenues of $1.1 billion in 2017; Plantronics announced 28 March 2018; the combined entity renamed Poly in 2019; HP announced 28 March 2022 (read 2026-10-05)
- Plantronics press release filed as Exhibit 99.1 to its Form 8-K, dated Santa Cruz, 2 July 2018: completed the acquisition of Polycom at a $2.0 billion enterprise value, consisting of approximately $1.638 billion in cash and 6.352 million Plantronics shares (read 2026-10-05)
- HP Inc. press release filed as Exhibit 99.1 to its Form 8-K, dated Palo Alto, 29 August 2022: completed the acquisition of Poly as an all-cash transaction of $40 per share, an enterprise value of approximately $3.3 billion inclusive of Poly's net debt; Poly described as video conferencing solutions, cameras, headsets, voice and software (read 2026-10-05)
- HP - Poly video and voice solutions, formerly Polycom and Plantronics: "Poly is now an HP product line" (read 2026-10-05)