Time for The VAR Guy to eat a little crow. A few days ago, he pointed out all the challenges facing Telepresence (next-generation video conferencing) and one particular vendor’s struggles (Polycom). Now, for the flip side of the story: Polycom and Alteva have an intriguing partnership that pushes TelePresence into small business. Here’s the scoop.

Alteva, which claims to be North America’s largest provider of enterprise hosted VoIP, is now a certified Polycom Reseller. Here’s why The VAR Guy is intrigued: Alteva offers hosted IP PBX and calling functionality to small and medium-sized businesses over a single IP network interface. Adding TelePresence to the mix should be a major upsell opportunity to Alteva.

Also of note: One of Cisco Systems’ big advantages in the TelePresence market is the networking giant’s ability to provide front-end systems (the Telepresence gear) and back-end infrastructure (switches, routers, etc.) to make it all run.

In theory, the Alteva-Polycom partnership should be able to provide the same end-to-end networking infrastructure for TelePresence. And not by coincidence, Alteva also partners with Cisco Systems.

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