Poly Brand Guidelines: Polycom, Plantronics & the Lava-Red Mark Now Sold as HP Poly

A three-pointed phone on the meeting table.

The name on today’s meeting-room video bars is the youngest part of the story. Polycom was co-founded in 1990 by Brian Hinman and Jeffrey Rodman, who had been colleagues at the video-conferencing company PictureTel, English Wikipedia says. The start-up began in San Francisco and soon moved to San Jose, California. Its stated aim was to support the main ways people communicate at work: audio, shared documents and video.

Its first product, in 1992, was the SoundStation, a triangular speakerphone with full-duplex audio, so that people at both ends of a call could speak and be heard at the same time. The three-pointed shape on the meeting table became the company’s signature object. It first shipped abroad, to the United Kingdom, in 1993, and was followed by the SoundStation Premier and, in 2004, the SoundStation 2. Polycom went public on Nasdaq in April 1996.

Video followed. In January 1998 Polycom bought ViaVideo, whose design became the ViewStation, a set-top unit with a pan-tilt-zoom camera made to sit on a user’s own monitor. In 2001 it bought Accord Networks, a maker of multipoint bridges, and in October that year PictureTel, the founders’ former employer. Desk phones arrived under the SoundPoint name from 1998, the first Polycom high-definition video system in 2006, and in 2007 the RealPresence Experience, a three-screen “immersive” conference room built on a design from Destiny Conferencing, a company Polycom had acquired that January. In 2011 it agreed to take over HP’s Visual Collaboration business, including its Halo telepresence rooms — an early link with the company that would later own Poly — and in 2012 it spun off its Wi-Fi and DECT phone business as Spectralink, English Wikipedia says.

Plantronics, a propeller and a Greek word.

The other half of Poly is older. Pacific Plantronics was incorporated on 18 May 1961 by two pilots, Courtney Graham and Keith Larkin, to make a lightweight headset for airline cockpits, English Wikipedia says; its MS-50 headset reached the market in 1962. Plantronics headsets were adapted for NASA’s Mercury programme and used through the Apollo missions, and the company grew into a maker of office, contact-centre, Bluetooth and gaming headsets, based in Santa Cruz, California.

Polycom changed hands twice in quick succession. In 2016 a planned merger with Mitel was dropped in favour of an all-cash offer from the New York private-equity firm Siris Capital Group, which took Polycom private. On 28 March 2018 Plantronics announced that it would buy Polycom, and a year later the two became one brand. On 18 March 2019, at the Enterprise Connect conference, the combined company relaunched as Poly, UC Today reported that day. The name, the report said, comes from the ancient Greek word for “many,” and was meant to stand for the audio and video backgrounds of both companies rather than simply to shorten Polycom.

The logo carried that history in its geometry. UC Today described its colour as a lava red, with angled letters that form a propeller in reference to Plantronics’ aviation lineage and three legs inspired by Polycom’s conference phone. The launch was not smooth: a day after the new mark appeared, the gaming-accessory maker PDP filed a trademark complaint over the logo, and Poly said it had developed its logo independently, Futurum Research reported in April 2019. Behind the new name, Plantronics, Inc. kept its legal name and its New York Stock Exchange listing, trading under the ticker POLY from May 2021, English Wikipedia says.

Rooms, racks and integrators.

Conference-room and pro AV makers sell a room more than a gadget. Their catalogues and websites tend to show the same scene: a meeting table, a large display on the wall, a slim video bar mounted under the screen, microphones set into the ceiling, and a small touch panel on the table that starts the call, dims the lights and switches the source. The equipment that makes the room work is usually out of sight, in a rack in a cupboard or above the ceiling tiles.

That hidden layer is where much of the industry’s engineering sits: control processors, signal switchers and extenders, amplifiers and digital signal processors that shape the audio of a room. These are boxes with plain faceplates and model numbers rather than consumer-style names, and their brands live on the label, the rack ear and the software screen an installer sees when setting up a system.

Most of these products do not reach buyers off a shelf. They are specified and wired in by systems integrators and installers working for companies, universities, schools and public bodies, and many makers run their own training and certification programmes for those partners. The trade gathers at fairs such as InfoComm in the United States and Integrated Systems Europe (ISE), where new panels, cameras and processors are shown on stands built to look like finished meeting rooms.

For a design guide, the category shows identity working at two scales: a calm, uncluttered room for the people who use it, and a dense, technical system of labels, connectors and part numbers for the people who build it. The makers in this guide are set out with what can be checked about who founded them, who owns them and where their products are made.

From an independent name to a range inside HP.

One episode from the Polycom years was settled as the companies joined. In a letter dated 20 December 2018, the US Department of Justice said it had declined to prosecute Polycom under its Foreign Corrupt Practices Act corporate enforcement policy, despite bribery committed by employees of the company’s subsidiaries in China. The letter cited Polycom’s own identification and prompt voluntary disclosure of the misconduct, its cooperation and its remediation, and set out a disgorgement of profits from the contracts concerned. English Wikipedia places the conduct between 2006 and 2014.

Poly’s independence lasted three years. HP Inc. announced the purchase in March 2022 and, in a press release dated 29 August 2022, said it had completed the acquisition, describing Poly as bringing video-conferencing systems, cameras, headsets, voice products and software to HP. The name has since been folded into HP’s own. HP’s US website now presents the range as HP Poly, “formerly Polycom & Plantronics,” and the product-data service Icecat told retailers in November 2025 that Poly had been formally rebranded as HP Poly. In meeting rooms that means names such as the HP Poly Studio X Series of all-in-one video bars, the Studio V Series of USB video bars and the modular Studio Room Compute, alongside headsets and desk phones that descend from the two older companies. English Wikipedia says most Plantronics products are produced in China and Mexico.

For a design guide, Poly shows how a merger can be told through one mark: a new name, a single strong red and a shape that borrows from both a cockpit headset and a three-legged conference phone. Compare HP, its owner since 2022, and Jabra, another headset brand. For this guide we use a lava-like red, charcoal and warm grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Poly’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.