Polycom (News - Alert), a provider of Web conferencing solutions, is on the road to make unified communications ubiquitous with its latest technological advances and continuing partnerships.

In a webcast this week, Polycom President Andy Miller said the new offerings from Polycom were based on customer input. “All the input that I hear can be narrowed down to a simple need: To be effectively communicating with others over video without boundaries,” he said. “It is something that the industry has struggled to deliver for decades."

Five months ago, Polycom launched the H.264 High Profile Solution, which enables telepresence to be delivered using far less bandwidth. Miller said that the new product announcements made this week set the benchmark for the way that people will communicate in the future.

“The industry leading telepresence solutions that Polycom delivers today will get even better,” said Joe Burton, Polycom’s chief strategy and technology officer.

Miller and Burton said Polycom’s approach is different from competitors, like Skype (News - Alert) or Cisco, with Polycom being very inclusive, based on open standards, and can support anywhere from two to thousands of participants.

“Telepresence (News - Alert) is as easy as a phone call or a click on you tablet screen,” Miller added.

This week’s announcements include: Microsoft has selected Polycom to be the developer of their core telepresence technology for a new platform. This will mean that the telepresence app will be delivered to hundreds of millions of Microsoft (News - Alert) desktop computers. Microsoft is also among the first companies to announce its intention to adopt Polycom's H.264 SVC [scalable video coding] technology.

The combination of Polycom's H.264 SVC technology and Microsoft's solutions will improve desktop video collaboration by delivering content across enterprise, small to medium business, home office and public network environments, and by providing interoperability with existing standards-based telepresence and video conferencing systems. Gartner predicts more than 200 million workers globally will use corporate-supplied desktop video conferencing by 2015.

A second area is related to mobile UC strategy, and Polycom’s partnership with the Samsung Galaxy Android tablet.

The third area relates to cloud strategy and a partnership with Broadsoft on cloud-based telepresence that provides lower cost, reduced complexity, and greater return on investment.

There are additional partnerships and undertakings in the future, both with partners in the Open Collaboration Network and potential licenses to Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM).

Polycom’s Open Collaboration Network includes partners such as Microsoft, Broadsoft, Avaya, IBM, McAfee (News - Alert), Hewlett-Packard, Juniper Networks and Siemens.

“This is a defining moment for Polycom, for the industry, for our customers and for our partners,” Miller added.