Polycom Unifies Visual Communication Infrastructure to Help Enterprises Scale Video Services

Increasing the use of visual communications is a focal point for many businesses as more companies discover unifying infrastructures can improve the efficiency, reliability and performance of video calls.

 

Through a network-based application that manages and distributes multipoint video calls within an enterprise network environment, Polycom (News - Alert) is delivering on the promise of greater video communications.

 

A global leader in telepresence, video and voice communications solutions, the company has launched its Distributed Media Applications (DMA) 7000 that is a built out network-based application designed specifically to manage and distribute multipoint video calls within an enterprise network environment.

 

The idea behind the project is to enhance the quality of video calls and making it easier and more cost-effective for organizations to deliver on-demand video conferencing services to employees.

 

Roopam Jain, a principal analyst of conferencing and collaboration at Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert), notes the increasing use of video communication within businesses has made a significant  impacting on the scalability requirements of enterprise networks/

 

“The Polycom DMA 7000 is uniquely designed to help large organizations spread ad-hoc video communication to thousands of users by improving the simplicity and reliability of the application, delivering scalability across a distributed network, and streamlining the management process to simplify deployment, administration and reduce costs.”

 

When deployed on application server, the DMA 7000 application manages and distributes video calls in a highly reliable and scalable method across multiple Polycom RMX 2000 media servers, which are video conferencing “bridges” that join multiple sites in the same meeting, connect users on different networks and optimize the call experience between video endpoints with different capabilities, according to Joe Sigrist, senior vice president and general manager of video solutions at Polycom.

 

“Visual communication is becoming a mission-critical communication tool for many customers, which requires that video services be available for employees to use at any time,” said Joe Sigrist.

 

 That is where the DMA 7000 comes in as it supports desktop, group and telepresence applications making life simpler customers looking to deploy on-demand video services broadly.

 

“It brings proven IP telephony practices to visual communication and leverages our experience in high-availability conferencing solutions for service provider networks to give enterprise customers carrier-class scalability, reliability and efficiency for delivering video services.”

 

Of course, the platform has its place beyond the boardroom.

 

The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals recently integrated the statewide visual communication network with the DMA 7000. The extensive state system facilitates thousands of hours of telemedicine and distance learning applications each month and the new Polycom technology brings expertise to an overloaded network.

 

 “Adding the DMA 7000 to , which includes eight bridges and more than 125 endpoints, significantly reduces help desk tasks associated with managing large-scale ad-hoc conferencing, which frees our time to tackle other projects,” said Gene Guffy, video administrator for the Louisiana Dept. of Health and Hospitals.

 

Guffy says the DMA 7000 also ensures continuity of operations in the event of a natural disaster, power outage and equipment maintenance. “For example, if a bridge on one of our university campuses loses power, all audio and video calls using meetings rooms on that bridge are automatically routed to other resources on the network.”

 

How it Works

 

The Polycom distributed network design allows organizations to connect and utilize main and branch office infrastructure systems together as part of a single, seamless solution.

 

The advantages gained for the distributed model includes increased scale, reliability and resource efficiency gains will help drive video adoption by increasing availability to end users, while also alleviating administrative concerns currently preventing large growth.

 

From a cost effective standpoint the platform allows organizations to scale video services as needed by easily adding additional media server resources without impacting current services or requiring significant administrative work. In turn, these resources can be increased by adding additional RMX media servers, or by adding greater capacity modules to existing RMX media servers, increasing the virtual pool of ports available across an organization.

 

The ability to rout calls in real time around network outages or oversubscribed or unavailable media servers is an advantage Polycom has been eager to tout with the DMA 7000. The design provides redundancy with modular components and no single point of failure.

 

From an administrative perspective the DMA 7000 streamlines many administrative tasks like provisioning, reporting and system maintenance and upgrades. The Simplified Video Network Administration eliminates the need for administrators to provision users for a specific media server and in the event of an outage or if use exceeded capacity, would need to re-provision users to another server. It does this though Active Directory integration, utilizing a common database and balancing call loads across all media server resources, according to Polycom.

 

While the platform is streamlined through centralized collection of call details, logs, port utilization, the DMA 7000 also supports zero downtime upgrades, which can also lower costs by allowing administrators to conduct system maintenance, update software or upgrade equipment during normal business hours without impacting video services.

 

The Polycom DMA 7000 is the latest development advancing the Polycom VC2 vision of video as a pervasive component of unified communication in the enterprise.