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Polycom Takes Giant Step Forward to Drive UC and Video Adoption Across Industries with Rich New Suite of Open APIs and Enhanced Scalability, Manageability, and Security for RealPresence® PlatformSAN JOSE, Calif. --(Business Wire)-- Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq:PLCM), the global leader in open standards-based unified communications (UC), today took a major step forward in its vision to help drive the adoption, delivery, and management of UC and video collaboration for enterprises, governments, and organizations focused on healthcare, education, and manufacturing, with a rich new suite of open APIs that facilitate the development of custom applications and extend the value of the Polycom® RealPresence® Platform - the most comprehensive and interoperable UC software infrastructure for universal video collaboration. In addition, Polycom also announced new enhancements to its UC software platform including the new Polycom® RealPresence® Resource Manager and support for Acme Packet (News - Alert) Net-Net session border controllers that improve the scalability, manageability, and secure delivery of video collaboration across organizations. With today's announcement, Polycom is providing independent software vendors (ISVs), channel partners, customers, and service providers with open APIs and software development kits (SDKs) to test, create, and ultimately deliver new software applications and solutions that integrate with the RealPresence Platform and provide added value to a video collaboration environment. Aimed at making video collaboration easier to integrate into everyday business processes, the suite of APIs allows developers within enterprises and organizations to tailor applications to seamlessly integrate with Polycom RealPresence video solutions such as provisioning, scheduling, conference management, billing, and resource reporting. "At McAfee (News - Alert), we are extremely serious about our promise to keep our customers safe," said David Piekarski, senior manager, global telecommunications operations at McAfee. "We achieve this through proactive solutions that secure the digital world for our millions of customers. Through Polycom video collaboration solutions, we are able to engage multiple, globally distributed engineers to support our most critical cases. With the advent of the new software updates to the platform, especially the open APIs, we envision being able to far more easily and cleanly integrate the software we use to support our customers." APIs Extend the Value of Polycom Video Collaboration Solutions Specific examples of applications leveraging Polycom APIs and extending the value of the Polycom platform include:
"Polycom has a dedicated focus on scaling video collaboration through a commitment to open standards, interoperability, new APIs, and a focus on a simple experience for end users and IT administrators," said Zeus Kerravala, CEO of ZKResearch. "This latest release enables both enterprises and service providers to deliver secure, high-quality video collaboration within the office as well as to on-the-go mobile users. The increase in use of video endpoints will further the value of video investments that are already in place and add to the 'network effect,' helping to make video a mainstream collaboration tool." ISVs and enterprise customers can obtain the new APIs and SDKs at developer.polycom.com, where they can also create and/or test custom solutions in a "digital sandbox" and participate in various industry discussion frums with other developers. Polycom is also introducing new professional services to support this program, including consulting support for existing customer IT resources, API software development, and full custom API software development for a specific project. "As more organizations realize the benefits of collaborating face-to-face by video from anywhere - benefits such as increased productivity, improved engagement, and reduced operational and travel costs - they want to fully incorporate video into their business processes and workflows to make usage as easy as possible," said Sudhakar Ramakrishna, President of Products and Services, Polycom. "Our new suite of APIs for the RealPresence Platform will provide this integration and give customers greater flexibility to innovate as they further build out their video collaboration networks to drive significant business value. At the same time, we're delivering more scalability and manageability to IT administrators who are looking to video-enable their organizations." Increased Manageability and Scalability of Video Collaboration Networks Another enhancement to the RealPresence Platform announced today is the new Polycom RealPresence Resource Manager, a new scheduling, management, and provisioning solution that significantly increases the scalability of the platform by 100 percent to allow a single RealPresence Resource Manager to support up to 10,000 devices including room and immersive systems, tablets, smartphones, laptops, and executive video desktops. The RealPresence Resource Manager also makes it easier for IT administrators to manage their organization's video collaboration network, including provisioning new devices to the network and monitoring video collaboration usage across the organization to ensure a reliable high-quality experience for the end user. In addition, RealPresence Resource Manager makes it easier to schedule and manage video collaboration calls. Extending Secure Video Collaboration Beyond the Office A growing number of employees are mobile and connecting to video collaboration networks via tablets, smartphones or laptops - yet they require the same levels of secure connectivity as employees working in the office. To meet this need, Polycom has achieved full interoperability with Acme Packet Net-Net session border controllers, which enables organizations to extend video collaboration to mobile devices and provides secure connectivity across network boundaries, without users worrying about the complexities of firewall traversal or networking configurations. To learn more about how Polycom can help businesses scale to support thousands of mobile workers, see the related Polycom RealPresence Mobile 1.3 press release. About Polycom RealPresence Platform The Polycom® RealPresence® Platform - the most comprehensive and interoperable UC infrastructure for universal video collaboration - provides robust provisioning, management, scalability, reliability, flexibility, and security. The unique open-standards approach of the Polycom RealPresence Platform ensures integration with hundreds of unified communications and social networking applications, and integrates with core networking and security infrastructure to deliver secure collaboration with any number of people across heterogeneous networks with up to 50 percent less bandwidth consumption than other solutions. Because of Polycom's focus on interoperability, the RealPresence Platform transforms islands of employees and fragmented communications systems into a seamless video enterprise, which makes enterprise-grade video easily and securely accessible to all authorized personnel whether they're mobile, remote, or on-site. The RealPresence Platform also provides the security, reliability, management, and massive scalability to support video as a cloud-based service, delivered by service providers to enterprises, SMBs, and consumers. To learn more about how the enhancements to the RealPresence Platform can benefit service providers, see the related press release. Availability The documentation for the open APIs on developer.polycom.com will be available in late July 2012 and the Polycom Resource Manager with multi-tenancy support will be available August 2012. The interoperability with Acme Packet Net-Net session border controllers is available today. Additional Supporting Customer Quote: "At GCS e-santé Picardie, our commitment is to modernize the technology system in the health and medical sector. It includes a progressive and ambitious telemedicine initiative that is underway with Polycom, as part of the Comedi-e telemedicine platform. Through Polycom video collaboration solutions, we're actively connecting physicians with patients by video for teleconsultations and teleconferences in various medical specialties under the management of Christine Boutet-Rixe, medical director of the GCS. We're expecting that the announced software updates of the platform, especially the open APIs, will provide more flexibility and options that we believe will help extend the value of the Polycom RealPresence Platform so that we can provide even more innovative telemedicine solutions to patients throughout Picardie, in North of France," said Christian Huart, Director of GCS e-santé. This Telemedicine Platform is integrated by OSPITEL (group SPIE Communications, INOVELAN, MiPiH) and promoted by the GCS e-santé Picardie. About Polycom Polycom is the global leader in open standards-based unified communications (UC) solutions for telepresence, video, and voice powered by the Polycom® RealPresence® Platform. The RealPresence Platform interoperates with the broadest range of business, mobile, and social applications and devices. More than 400,000 organizations trust Polycom solutions to collaborate and meet face to face from any location for more productive and effective engagement with colleagues, partners, customers, specialists, and prospects. Polycom, together with its broad partner ecosystem, provides customers with the best total cost of ownership, interoperability, scalability, and security for video collaboration, whether on-premises, hosted, or cloud delivered. Visit www.polycom.com or connect with Polycom on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. This release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the "safe harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 regarding future events, including statements regarding Polycom taking a step forward in its vision to help drive adoption, delivery and management of UC and video collaboration in certain industries. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially, including the impact of competition on our product sales and for our customers and partners; the impact of increased competition due to consolidation in our industry or competition from companies that are larger or that have greater resources than we do; potential fluctuations in results and future growth rates; risks associated with general economic conditions and external market factors; the market acceptance of our products and changing market demands, including demands for differing technologies or product and services offerings; our ability to successfully integrate our acquisitions into our business; possible delays in the development, availability and shipment of new products; increasing costs and differing uses of capital; changes in key personnel that may cause disruption to the business; any disruptive impact to us that may result from new executive hires; continuing disruption to the business due to the realignment of the North America sales organization; our inability to achieve the expected results from adjustments being made to our expense profile; the impact of restructuring actions; and the impact of global conflicts that may adversely impact our business. Many of these risks and uncertainties are discussed in the Company's Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2012, and in other reports filed by Polycom with the SEC (News - Alert). Polycom disclaims any intent or obligations to update these forward-looking statements. NOTE: The product plans, specifications, and descriptions herein are provided for information only and subject to change without notice, and are provided without warranty of any kind, express or implied. Polycom reserves the right to modify future product plans at any time. Products and related specifications referenced herein are not guaranteed and will be delivered on a when and if available basis. © 2012 Polycom, Inc. All rights reserved. POLYCOM®, the Polycom logo, and the names and marks associated with Polycom's products are trademarks and/or service marks of Polycom, Inc. and are registered and/or common law marks in the United States and various other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Photos/Multimedia Gallery Available: http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/mmg.cgi?eid=50341503&lang=en
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