NEWS Polycom is to buy fellow conferencing and collaboration company Voyant Technologies for $110.7m.
The move comes as the web-based conferencing market is seeing some major jostling for position, with Cisco recently acquiring conferencing software vendor Latitude for $80m earlier this month.
Voyant CEO Bill Ernstrom will stay with the company reporting to Phil Keenan, senior VP and GM of Polycom's Network Systems group.
Tony Heyworth, Polycom director of marketing EMEA, said the deal will also give Polycom a deeper relationship with service providers such as AT&T, BT, France Telecom, MCI, NTT, Sprint and WebEx, all of whom use Voyant for "carrier-class audio conferencing".
Ernstrom said that the deal will mean the most integrated voice, video and web-based collaboration offering for the office or on the road and looked forward to a world where SIP and IP provide service providers and users with conferencing flexibility.
Colorado-based Voyant has been an audio conferencing specialist for over 25 years and the deal could see an additional $35m being paid upon the company hitting certain targets.
In separate news, web conferencing specialist Webex has announced a deal with travel management software company KDS. The thinking is that for those individuals who decide not to travel, web conferencing using Webex should be the next best option.
