[Asterisk-Users] Re: Polycom phones

[John Baker]

Matt, you're lucky.  They wasted about four months of my time before I 
finally gave up.

John

mattf wrote:
> 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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