Polycom®, Inc. (NASDAQ: PLCM), provider of unified collaborative communications solutions, has announced two new solutions that expand its voice-over-IP (VoIP) and VSX™ flagship group video conferencing product lines while broadening Polycom’s industry leading support for Session Initiation Protocol (SIP).

The SoundStation® IP 4000 is a new IP conference phone based on the award-winning and iconic triangular-shaped SoundStation line delivering unrivalled voice quality and microphone pick-up capabilities and expanding Polycom’s support for SIP to conference phones. Also supporting SIP, the VSX 6000 is a new entry-level addition to the breakthrough VSX line of video conferencing systems and is designed to reduce the cost barrier for high-quality video conferencing and collaboration.

The SoundStation IP 4000 SIP conference phone delivers remarkable voice quality and microphone pick-up capability enabling people to be heard clearly up to 10 feet away from the phone. The phone features a backlit, graphical LCD, gated microphones and expanded microphone capabilities for larger conference rooms, and SIP support for BroadSoft and Sylantro Systems environments.

The phone’s 248 x 68 pixel resolution LCD offers easy access to the most common business telephony functions including transfer, hold, redial and conference. The combination of a SoundStation IP 4000 conference phone with Polycom’s complete line of SoundPoint® IP desktop phones, provides customers with a range of solutions for SIP-based communications environments, which can deliver productivity enhancing applications on the phones and flexible telephony options with Polycom reliability and quality.

“Our industry-first SIP conference phone combined with our award-winning SoundPoint IP phones offers customers a range of high-quality, standards-based VoIP phones for different desktop environments and the conference room,” said Sunil Bhalla, senior vice president and general manager of voice communications at Polycom. “We are pleased to launch our new SIP conference phone with two leaders in the VoIP application server market - BroadSoft and Sylantro Systems.”

The Polycom VSX 6000 is a new entry-level video conferencing system ideal for smaller, IP-ready conference rooms and for companies that require high-quality video collaboration on a limited budget.

The VSX 6000 is the industry’s only entry-level video conferencing system that offers superb quality audio fidelity with 14 kHz audio, 360-degree voice pickup from the VSX microphone array, and Polycom 14kHz StereoSurround™ for unprecedented sound quality and clarity that uniquely recreates the spatial quality of sound from a participant’s location at the far end of the conference room. Polycom VSX is the only video conferencing line in the industry to offer audio error concealment and the capability to add voice-only participants with the integration of the SoundStation VTX 1000 conference phone.

The VSX 6000 is also the only entry-level system that offers essential features such as second monitor support, dual monitor emulation, multiple options for high resolution data sharing, extensive SIP support for Microsoft and Nortel Networks environments, and built-in Cisco CallManager 4.0 ECS support. The VSX 6000 will also join the entire VSX product line in the next release of Avaya’s Video Telephony Solution Powered By Polycom™.

The VSX series maintains unsurpassed video quality in an H.264 video call at low bandwidths, while at the same time presenting data and projecting voices in 14 kHz audio, a scenario that no other video conferencing product can support. The VSX series offers proven superiority in Quality of Service initiatives with outstanding video error concealment.

Like the VSX 7000 and VSX 8000 models, the VSX 6000 offers the unique ability to launch video calls and add voice-only participants through a Polycom SoundStationVTX™ 1000 conference phone for added ease of use. Various collaboration capabilities are available based on customer needs, including People+Content™ IP on a wireless network or People+Content through the VisualConcert™ VSX. Web streaming and closed captioning are also supported.

Polycom MGC™ bridges and VSX video systems interoperate currently with SIP implementations from Microsoft Live Communication Server and Nortel Networks Multimedia Communication Server (MCS) 5100 and 5200 products. Polycom is working with these partners and others to lead the development of video extensions for the SIP standard within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

Availability Polycom VSX 6000 (MSRP US$5,499 +GST) and the SoundStation IP 4000 (MSRP US$1099 +GST) for BroadSoft and Sylantro Systems environments are all now available from certified Polycom channel partners and through Polycom VoIP Certified Resellers respectively.