Polycom Acquires Accordent Technologies for $50 Million

Unified communications services specialist Polycom announced the acquisition of Accordent Technologies, a provider of video content management and delivery solutions, for approximately $50 million in cash. Polycom said it expects this acquisition to be neutral to earnings in 2011 and slightly accretive to earnings in 2012.

Accordent grew to $9 million in revenues in 2010 and has more than 1,200 customers in the enterprise and public sector, and through select service providers. The staff of 50 employees will remain in southern California and will report into Polycom's UC research and development organization. Polycom said in a statement that Accordent's software-centric solution would become an integral element of the Polycom UC Intelligent Core and would be reported with Polycom's Network Infrastructure revenues.

"Polycom is committed to delivering an innovative, flexible and world-class video communications solution to customers over the entire content lifecycle – from real-time to capture, to management, to delivery," said Sudhakar Ramakrishna, Polycom chief development officer. "We believe Accordent has the most elegant video content management solution on the market and by leveraging customer, channel, partner and product synergies with Polycom, this transaction positions Polycom at the forefront of end-to-end video and content management. We welcome Accordent's customers and employees to the Polycom team."

The deal will see the integration of Polycom's open standards UC Intelligent Core and UC endpoints with Accordent’s open standards video content management solution. The Accordent solution provides capture solutions for all major video use cases, whether delivering live webcasts from the studio, providing automated rich media webcasting from the meeting or classroom, adding a streaming extension to videoconferences or enabling user-generated content from the desktop.

According to data from market research firm Wainhouse Research, this acquisition would immediately expand Polycom's total available market by $500 million and, for this video management segment, this market is projected to generate a compounded annual growth rate of 32 percent through 2014 to $1.2 billion. As a strategic partner with Microsoft, Accordent said the acquisition would strengthen and further differentiat Polycom's native integration with Microsoft Lync and Sharepoint.

"From our first meeting with Polycom, we shared a common vision about the future of unified collaboration and the paradigm shift in the way people communicate and work," said Mike Newman, previous Accordent Chief Executive Officer. "By integrating Accordent's video content management solutions with Polycom's unparalleled end-to-end video solution, we believe we can make this vision a reality as we harness the natural synergies between our two companies."

Earlier this week, Polycom and Motorola announced a partnership to bring telepresence capability to Motrola’s Google Android-powered Xoom tablet. The Polycom telepresence video application on the Xoom tablets is designed to deliver improved enterprise collaboration and productivity by enabling users to connect and share content from anywhere via one-to-one or group video experiences. Features include UC Intelligent Core, which allows businesses like Motorola to extend enterprise visual communications to mobile users without additional network configuration, and connection to an estimated ecosystem of 2 million standards-based video room systems in use currently.