Polycom Bolsters Telepresence Tools

In a move seemingly but well-timed to offset arch-competitor Cisco’s (News - Alert) deal for Tandberg, Polycom has come out with new capabilities for its telepresence solutions aimed at giving its customers greater flexibility in the use and management of immersive telepresence suites throughout their organization. 


Polycom’s telepresence product lines include:

*          The Polycom RealPresence Experience which provides a ‘same room’ collaboration experience for up to 28 people in each location

*          The Polycom Telepresence (News - Alert) Experiencethat supplies an ‘across-the-table’ experience for meetings

*          The Polycom Architected Telepresence Experience, which is a highly customizable telepresence kit that can be adapted for specific room environments and unique application requirements by qualified audio/visual systems integrators. Polycom also offers a range of room telepresence products for small to large meeting rooms and personal telepresence products for executive offices and desktops

Polycom has delivered new capabilities for these solutions. The key ones are:

*          A new Meeting Composer tool that allows users to select locations using the room’s touch screen controller and click a button to initiate point-to-point or multi-site calls. The Meeting Composer is integrated with Polycom's Converged Management Application, which provides a searchable global directory of all video endpoints within an organization. The controller also supports a local directory with commonly used locations to further simplify the calling options for users

*          Screen layouts have been automated. Immersive telepresence systems like the Polycom RPX, TPX and ATX have multiple cameras, screens and video codecs. It is not uncommon for calls to involve multiple sites with combinations of one, two, three and four screen systems. When a user dials a call involving multiple locations, the various sites are now automatically configured and optimized on the screens for all sites in a call based on the capabilities of each system. For users this provides one-touch simplicity, eliminating the need for support resources to assist with this process

*          Polycom RPX, TPX and ATX solutions now support both continuous presence and voice activated room switching for multi-site calls. Continuous presences allow users to see all sites in a call on screen simultaneously. Voice activated room switching shows just the active site on screen in full size and changes when someone at another site speaks. Polycom immersive telepresence systems are reportedly the only systems on the market to support voice activated room switching for rooms with one to four screens

*          There is now interoperability with Microsoft (News - Alert) Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 clients. This allows users to better leverage their desktop video capabilities within telepresence meetings as part of the overall unified communications environment. These clients can also be added to the local directory within telepresence rooms allowing users to easily connect with one-touch dialing. The Microsoft OCS linkages joins that of similar solutions from other suppliers including Avaya, Broadsoft and IBM (News - Alert)

Polycom’s moves are multi-win, for organizations seeking telepresence tools and who then benefit from greater innovation and heightened competition, for the firm and for the environment thanks to the ability of these solutions to reduce air and road travel, which produce harmful emissions and consume greenspace for their infrastructures. Videoconferencing is growing in popularity thanks to its ability to cut corporate and environmental/social costs. The value of the video conferencing market is set to post a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.8 percent between 2008 and 2013, rising from $3.8 billion to $8.6 billion according to Gartner (News - Alert).

“The opportunities for telepresence are limited only by imagination,” Youssef Saleh, vice president and general manager, Telepresence and Vertical Solutions, Polycom, said. “The ability for people to see each other clearly and share information and content instantly across distances can be applied to virtually any industry to enhance collaboration, improve productivity and reduce costs.”