[Asterisk-Users] Re: Polycom phones

[Kanuri, Seshu (Company IT)]

-----Original Message-----
When I talked with the VP of VOIP phone sales at Polycom about a year
ago, he was offering a dedicated engineer for the Asterisk community
that would work through issues like people have here. BUT they would
ONLY do this if a reseller came forward and committed to be the Polycom
authorized reseller to Asterisk users and the dedicated engineer at
Polycom would only talk to people at that reseller company. After
wasting 3 months unsuccessfully trying to convince a half dozen
resellers to be that company I gave up. That reseller would have to
raise the prices to be able to support the phones, and as long as you
can buy the Polycom phones at a lower cost from over a dozen companies
that company would be losing a lot of business.

I didn't fault anyone at the reseller companies I talked to, they would
be taking a risk by dedicating resources to supporting Asterisk with no
guarantee of exclusivity from Polycom. The problem is with Polycom, they
make about as much by Cisco selling a phone(from licensing of Polycom
technology) as they do by selling their own phones(with many other costs
and liabilities associated with it). They have no real incentive to go
all out and compete with their biggest customers(Cisco, Avaya, etc...)
So they don't try to make their phones a mass-market item. It's a shame,
because I really like the Polycom phones and have several in our office.
If someone else wants to take up the fight, contact me off list and I'll
send you my contacts.

MATT---

Matt,

Can you please pass on the contacts to Rana Dutt at voicehigway
(rdutt at vhway.com) - Ph: 732-705-9201. Voice Highway can be that reseller
and can support this community. Voice Highway already sells the IAX2
enabled Netweb-301s and PAP2s. By the way VoiceHighway may also need a
tonne of these for deployment ( Hush!Hush - guess where - for a City in
Connecticut...)

Seshu 
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