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Comment by mkane848 | Hacker News Reader

While things like Jabber have an obvious alternative (i.e. Slack), who can compete with Cisco in terms of their desk phones and meeting room equipment? I only ask because their hardware is so ingrained in the company I work for that even if I were somehow able to convince everyone that Slack was worth switching for, who the hell else am I gonna get video conferencing equipment like this[0] from?

[0]http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/collaborati...

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Since I work for a competitor, I'll have to shill: StarLeaf https://www.starleaf.com/

It's "cloud based" which means you don't need to maintain a video conferencing box in the basement.

Thanks for the link! I'm low on the totem pole with these sort of decisions, but I'll be sure to keep this bookmarked for any future meeting or opportunity to pivot away from Cisco :)

Polycom and Huawei are the two next largest providers of telepresence equipment and there are a host of smaller competitors.

As far as phones Avaya is the big competitor in the enterprise space. Microsoft Skype for Business/Lync is also deployed many places for voice using phones from a variety of suppliers including Polycom and HP. Lately a lot of enterprises have started to move away from desk phones to using soft phones.

Yeah, polycom is pretty big in that space, leveraging their long history with conference room phones.

Cool, I'll have to look into both! Huawei feels like an "Oh, right, of course" answer but Polycom doesn't ring any bells.

Interesting observation on the soft phones trend, though. In my work environment our Cisco phones might as well be softphones since everything's rigged through Jabber. Give us a webcam instead of the desk phone and I don't see any loss of functionality.

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