February 8th, 2007
Polycom to buy SpectraLink for $220 million cash
Polycom announced its intention to buy SpectraLink Corporation for ~$220 million dollars in cash. Polycom is well known for their analog and IP telephony products as well as standard and high definition video conferencing while SpectraLink specializes in cordless and Wi-Fi phones. Polycom's strength is in the high acoustic quality of their phones and wideband Codecs while SpectraLink was the pioneer in wireless QoS enabled Wi-Fi phones. SpectraLink's proprietary wireless QoS mechanism called SVP (SpectraLink Voice Priority) was so dominant that nearly every single enterprise-class access point from any vendor had support for the SVP mechanism. The two companies' strengths complement each other well so this merger seems to make a lot of sense.
The actual merger won't be completed until the second quarter of 2007. At this point in time it's too early to see what comes out of this deal but I have some pretty good guesses. I asked Polycom when we'll start seeing SpectraLink phones with wideband 16 kHz G.722 Codec support in addition to Polycom's G.722.1 codec and Polycom replied that it was too early to tell at this point. This will definitely be an interesting development in the IP Telephony market once the merger fully plays out.
George Ou is Technical Director of ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
