On Monday, Polycom spent the better part of the day launching an entirely new product line, both in hardware and services, as well as setting forth the company’s vision for the future of videoconferencing.

Included in those announcements were a totally new (and, so far, the industry’s only) open-standards scalable video codes in the form of the new SVC (we wrote all about it here), a set of VTC products designed for small and medium sized businesses in the form of their new RealPresence 300 system (we wrote about it here) and even launched the industry’s first cloud-based system called CloudAXIS that allows for Polycom video calls, Skype video calls, Google Talk calls, and even Facebook calls to be connected together (we wrote about it here).

And, you SHOULD care. What Polycom is doing is offering amazing opportunity, both in new product offerings (some even reach 1080p/60 fps) and services that include recurring revenue streams for ProAV integrators. This represents an awesome opportunity for you, as integrators, to recapture a giant chunk of one of the fastest growing segments of AV right now: videoconferencing.

Following their announcements Monday, the talk among existing Polycom customers (and some competitors) was that Polycom was killing off the HDX systems. And this would matter as the HDX is one of the only systems, market wide, that still supports POTS and ISDN connectivity.

So are they?

Nope! In fact, not only does HDX lives, but Polycom also announced that it’s actually issued a new HDX Series 3.1 update. The upgrades include the Polycom RealPresence Whiteboard, which is embedded virtual whiteboard software in a video-conferencing unit with no external PC required. Users can annotate on the same digital screen, and support for standard touchscreens allows for dual-screen set-up and annotation with fingertips (similar to iPad).