Polycom (News - Alert) is a renowned provider of telepresence, video and voice communications solutions. Through its Polycom ARENA ecosystem program, the company encourages the proliferation of new collaborative communications solutions that benefit organizations across the industries. Aruba Networks (News - Alert), one of the Polycom ARENA ecosystem partners, recently announced that Polycom has certified Aruba's Virtual Branch Networking (VBN) solution for use with its suite of unified communications products for teleworkers.

The partnership is designed to benefit the remote users working at home, in branch offices, or on the road. The joint solution is expected to reduce the time, cost and network engineering required to deliver telepresence, video conferencing and voice communication services to these remote workers.

According to Aruba, VBN rightsizes the cost of remote networking by using centrally-managed, user-configured Remote Access Points (RAPs) and delivers secure access.  And all these are offered for a price as little as $99 per site. Here is how:

Previously establishing a remote network required complex virtual private networks that had to be installed by IT staff. Aruba's no-cost Virtual Intranet Client delivers RAP functionality to PC users, while a cloud-based content security service economically delivers enterprise-class protection for branches of one to many.

“Polycom and its ARENA ecosystem partners such as Aruba Networks are focused on proliferating new collaborative communications solutions that benefit organizations worldwide. Aruba's solution addresses the unique remote networking needs to simplify unified communications for teleworkers. In fact, Polycom uses the solution to provide remote video teleconferencing to our own employees at their home offices,” Mark Roberts (News - Alert), vice president of partner marketing, Polycom, said.

As a result of the partnership, Polycom’s complete portfolio of Unified Communications (UC) products can now be easily extended to branch offices and remote workers with Aruba's VBN. Solutions include a variety of high definition visual communications solutions delivered over IP networks. These range from personal telepresence solutions to immersive telepresence solutions; video conferencing systems for conference rooms, teams and personal use; and voice-over-IP handsets and voice conferencing systems.

“As enterprises have scaled up telework initiatives to improve productivity, reduce real estate footprints and lower overhead costs, the limitations and expense of traditional remote access solutions have highlighted the need for a better alternative. Aruba VBN addresses this issue with exceptionally low per user and per site deployment costs, unmatched ease-of-use, and centralized management that gives IT departments complete visibility into performance and hardware status. Used in conjunction with Polycom's best-in-class unified communications solution, VBN makes it practical to broadly implement telework programs across any enterprise, small or large,” said Manav Khurana, Aruba's head of Industry Marketing.