Poly Inc., formerly Plantronics, inc. and Polycom, is an American multinational corporation that develops video, voice and content collaboration and communication technology. Poly is a subsidiary of HP Inc. Polycom was co-founded in 1990 by Brian L Hinman and Jeffrey Rodman. In 2018 Polycom was acquired by Plantronics and in 2019 the name of the combined entity was changed to Poly. In 2022, it was sold to HP.
History Polycom was co-founded in 1990 by Brian Hinman and Jeffrey Rodman, who were colleagues at PictureTel Corp. The startup was based in San Francisco, California but soon moved to San Jose, California, with Hinman using $400,000 of his own money and $100,000 from friends as seed money. Oak Investment Partners and Accel Partners then contributed an additional $3 million in venture capital. Polycom's stated goal was to support all the major ways people communicate, specifically including audio, content such as documents, and video. Its first products to market were audio conferencing speaker phones. The company later added content sharing, video conferencing, video network and bridging, and system monitoring and management products. Brian Hinman served as CEO from the company's founding in 1990 until 1998, when he was succeeded by Bob Hagerty. Hagerty was succeeded by Andy Miller in 2010. At Polycom, Miller was charged with several expense and accounting violations by the SEC in 2012, and settled with the SEC by agreeing to not serve as an officer for any company for five years. Miller left Polycom after being paid US$24 million in compensation. He was succeeded as CEO by Peter Leav, who was then succeeded in 2016 by Mary McDowell following Polycom's acquisition by Siris Capital Group. In 2015, Polycom cut 15% of its workforce after posting large dips in sales. Polycom reported revenues of $1.3 billion for the year of 2015. Peter Leav at that point was both president and CEO, and Laura Durr was chief financial officer and executive vice president (EVP).
Acquisitions of Poly In 2016, telecommunications executive Mary McDowell was named as its chief executive officer. On April 15, 2016, Polycom announced that rival Mitel Networks would purchase them for $1.96 billion. As Mitel, a smaller company based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, paid a lower tax rate, the acquisition would have been an example of tax inversion, where a smaller company purchases a larger company in order to provide the combined larger corporate entity with the tax benefits of the smaller company's location. In July 2016, the Mitel deal was scrapped in favor of an all-cash offer from New York City–based private equity firm Siris Capital Group. Siris acquired Polycom for $1.7 billion. In 2017, Polycom had revenues of $1.1 billion. On March 28, 2018, Plantronics announced that it would acquire Polycom for approximately $2 billion. On December 27, 2018, Plantronics agreed to pay $36 million to settle a bribery investigation connected to Polycom. The United States Justice Department declined to bring criminal charges for misconduct that allegedly occurred between 2006 and 2014, citing Polycom's voluntary disclosure. On March 28, 2022 HP Inc. announced their acquisition of Poly, completed in August 2022 with a total transaction value of $3.3 billion, including debt.
Acquisitions by Poly
Note : 1 June 2011 – HP and Polycom, announced they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Polycom will acquire the assets of HP's Visual Collaboration (HPVC) business, including the Halo Products and Managed Services business of HPVC.
Products The company also licensed a variety of technologies, including H.264 video codecs, Siren codecs, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), native 1080p high-definition cameras and displays, native 720p and 1080p high-definition encoding/decoding, low-latency architecture and low bandwidth utilization, wideband advanced audio coding with low delay (AAC-LD), multichannel spatial audio with echo cancellation and interference filters to eliminate feedback from mobile devices, and inter-operation with legacy video conferencing.
SoundStation Its first product in 1992 was SoundStation, a triangular speakerphone with full-duplex audio allowing both parties to simultaneously speak and be heard. SoundStation and its successor, SoundStation Premier became the leading brand in the market in the 1990s. The SoundStation was superseded by the SoundStation 2 in 2004 when AT&T discontinued the AT&T DSP16A processor on which the original SoundStation was based. Building on technological advancements that occurred during the nearly 10-year period, the SoundStation 2 exhibited more features and improved sound transparency, although was still limited to 3 kHz audio bandwidth due to its conventional analog POTS connection. It was supplemented by the SoundStation 2W wireless speakerphone, which was a DECT system (WDCT in North America), and by the SoundStation VTX1000 wired speakerphone, the first POTS speakerphone capable of 7 kHz audio or HD Voice operation over conventional telephone lines.
Audio products
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