Polycom
More info
- Creator
- Brian Hinman, Jeffrey Rodman
- Released
- 1990
- Owner
- HP (as Poly, since 2022)
- Type
- Conference phones and videoconferencing
The company behind the triangular speakerphone that sat in the middle of every meeting table for thirty years.
Polycom was founded in 1990 and in 1992 launched the SoundStation, the grey three-microphone triangle that became so common in conference rooms that the shape itself meant "conference call". It went on to videoconferencing systems and office VoIP phones, competing with Cisco for those same rooms for years.
Once meetings moved into Zoom and Teams on ordinary laptops, the market for expensive dedicated hardware shrank. Polycom merged with headset maker Plantronics in 2018, and from 2019 the combined company was called Poly. In 2022 HP bought Poly, and the triangle lives on under its third name.