Virtual Office Resource

Polycom is a hot commodity – so hot that Mitel (News - Alert) is working to acquire the business communications company for $2 billion. While this move is likely to give interesting competition to Cisco, Microsoft and Avaya (News - Alert), it can also mean great things for those wanting personalization in the virtual office.

According to a recent BizTech Magazine piece, the move could help create an evolutionary shift in the enterprise communications market. As Mitel’s sixth acquisition in just four years, the transaction could help lead to more customized services. To be competitive, vendors will have to identify innovative ways to help companies improve their bottom lines.

Mitel expects to be on the forefront, putting the competition in its place. According to CEO Richard McBee, the company has a solid understanding of how the market is going to come together. This acquisition is part of the company’s strategy to pull the pieces together and become one of the more formidable players.

The visions for Mitel and Polycom (News - Alert) also align pretty well for two companies coming together to provide better options for businesses. Mitel has long been focused on seamless communications and collaboration. Polycom has built a strong reputation for simplifying collaboration. As more and more companies adopt new ways of doing business – like the virtual office – the demand for innovative solutions around collaboration will continue to expand.

The key to the unified company’s success is understanding the intricacies of the marketplace and what companies need to be successful. While a number of the organizations operating in the target audience space have clearly identified communications and collaboration strategies, many others are working with siloed operations and broken systems that aren’t delivering the kind of efficiency and benefit they were designed to provide. Mitel and Polycom together can bridge this gap and enable companies to take better control of the communications advancements available to streamline activities.

At the same time, there’s opportunity to allow companies to actually take advantage of unified communications. While this term has taken on an interesting life of its own and lost some of the original meaning, the goal is to enable organizations to take advantage of unified platforms to streamline the ways in which they communicate. For instance, it’s time for users to stop taking notes during an audio conferencing meeting and then typing them to store in a Word document. Everything from this interaction should be captured on one platform that drives true collaboration and stops wasting time.

As this acquisition comes together and finalizes this year, we should expect to see great things from the market overall. The enterprise will benefit as competitors rise up to challenge the new Mitel offerings and smaller vendors mimic these offerings to appeal to the small business. It’s a great time to need communications and collaboration solutions.