Are Changes Coming At Polycom?

Today the very influential conferencing industry analyst report, Electronic Telespan which is written and edited by Elliot Gold lobbed a bomb and a hand grenade in the direction of Polycom in the subsription only newsletter.

First off Elliot who uses the numbers to guide his business analysis points out the problems at Polycom-basically saying the numbers don't add up and that videoconferencing endpoint systems sales were down "14.6% from the same quarter a year earlier and down 20.2% sequentially from the fourth quarter last year." Gold also points out that the average sales price of group video endpoints fell leading to a flat a number, likely from pressure from the growing incurrsion of soft clients.

But the chilling comment was about video revenue being down for Polycom, 11% on a year over year basis. Net net-Polycom sold less and made less. Ouch.

But beyond painting a bad picture for Polycom's sales challenges, J.D. Vaughn lobbed the bigger explosion, reporting that Polycom CEO Andy Miller is on the ropes and hanging by a thread. Vaughn went out on a limb and basically saying that Miller's days are numbered at the top. 

I have been subscribing to Electronic Telespan for some years as it provides great insight and is not web content. It's a bit old school in approach, in that you only receive a link to a PDF file. So, while it's old school, it's still full of news every month and editions like today's make the subscription worthwhile.