Increasingly, video conferencing has emerged as a way that business professionals collaborate. Since these exchanges can often occur on the fly, security has been a concern, one that Polycom and McAfee are trying to assuage.The two companies forged an alliance to develop a framework for Secure Unified Communications and Collaboration. The partners plan to incorporate McAfee's threat protection solutions, including the McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator console, into Polycom UC endpoints and Intelligent Core. In addition, they are expected to align their monitoring and provisioning tools.

Currently, small and medium businesses need to cobble together security products from vendors, such as McAfee, with collaboration tools, such as those offered by Polycom. The new partnership will result in bundling of those capabilities, so deployment and ongoing maintenance could become simpler. On the flip side, businesses may already have other security tools in place, so they would not want to deploy the McAfee solution and may even find that it conflicts with those tools.

During the past few months, Polycom has forged alliances with a number of vendors, including HP and Microsoft. The video conferencing vendor has been trying to expand its reach to compete with Tandberg, which was acquired by Cisco early in the year. The latest agreement enables Polycom to match one more function (security) that Cisco could bundle with its telepresence systems. Going forward, the question arises: will businesses opt for the Polycom approach, which involves several partners, or feel more comfortable purchasing video conferencing products that come from one vendor, namely Cisco?