A letter from Polycom CEO Andy Miller on the Microsoft acquisition of Skype

May 10, 2011

Dear valued Polycom customer,

Today, our Polycom Open Collaboration Network partner Microsoft® announced its intention to acquire Skype. We view Microsoft's planned acquisition of Skype as great news on many fronts. Most importantly, this acquisition will ultimately benefit customers of all sizes by building a video communications continuum from consumers to the enterprise, and expanding the frontier of UC Everywhere.

The acquisition brings Skype into the fold of one of Polycom's closest strategic partners and will extend the reach of Microsoft's Lync^™ platform into new markets. With this integration, you will have a greater opportunity to connect to Skype's broad customer base of 170 million users, while continuing to enjoy the benefits of secure, fully interoperable, and open UC solutions from Polycom that span enterprise and public sector organizations, as well as small and medium business (SMB), mobile, and consumer environments.

Microsoft remains a key strategic partner for Polycom and our relationship will only grow stronger as we continue to jointly lead the industry in developing end-to-end UC solutions that provide open interoperability, flexibility, and investment protection to customers. In close partnership with Microsoft, Polycom has developed a complete portfolio of enterprise-grade voice, video, and infrastructure solutions optimized for Microsoft Lync, including the Polycom UC Intelligent Core^™ platform. We look forward to continuing to leverage the native integration enabled by the universal bridging capabilities of the UC Intelligent Core, to deliver unparalleled user experiences to customers across all Microsoft environments.

In addition, we believe that Polycom and Microsoft—incorporating Skype—will continue to be uniquely positioned to jointly deliver what our customers want: open standards-based communications systems that provide investment protection and interoperability in multi-platform UC environments. Conversely, this pending merger stands to further isolate Cisco as a closed “island” of technologies.

In closing, Microsoft's acquisition of Skype is tremendous news for Polycom and our customers because it will further drive the proliferation of video communications worldwide and continue the shift to UC Everywhere—whereby people are enabled to communicate and collaborate anywhere on any device.

Sincerely,

Andy Miller
President and Chief Executive Officer