[Asterisk-Users] Re: Polycom phones

[mattf]

Hello,

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---


-----Original Message-----
From: Walt Reed [mailto:asterisk at linuxguy.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2005 12:52 PM
To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] Re: Polycom phones


On Thu, Jan 27, 2005 at 11:30:26AM -0500, Kanuri, Seshu (Company IT) said:
> My opinion (guess) on Polycom's Asterisk policy is - It is not that
> Polycom does not want their phones to be used with Asterisk. At the
> price these phones are sold, they will not be able provide support for
> all the features (AKA bugs or quirks) of Asterisk and make them
> transparent to Asterisk SIP stack and more notably - be user friendly
> for the Asterisk newbie user community. :)

That does not excuse them from not making the firmware or ducumentation
available. There is no reason for them to not allow downloads or provide
documentation - even requiring registration before download would be
OK.

Furthermore, one of the current issue people have (not being able to
disable call-waiting) is going to be a problem for ANY sip PBX software,
not just asterisk.

If they had ONE internal advocate that monitored this list for 2 hours a
day and provided feedback to internal engineering / product management,
and *occasionally* provided information to the list on major issues
people have, they could sell a LOT more of these phones and we would not
be having this discussion.

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