Polycom Endorses "UC Everywhere;" Strengthens Philippines Presence with ATI

With the advent of the Internet in 1989, technologies and applications have evolved to maximize the potential of communication within this medium. Polycom, one of the world's leading unified-communications innovator and telepresence leader, highlighted this aspect in a media conference last week.

Held at Conti's restaurant in Makati City, the program started with a technology introduction from Rene Valladolid, Polycom's Regional Channel Director for Hongkong, Taiwan and the Philippines (right photo).

With more than 3000 employees worldwide, Polycom has 53 offices in 26 countriues and continues to strengthen their distribution business by promoting communication tools.

Randel Maestre, Polycom's Global Head and Senior Director for Industry Solutions (photo below), also shared from a consumer market survey that "most users are intimidated by technology." And due to this, they also came up with a very user-friendly touch-screen based control pad.

Polycom further emphasized on their concept of "UC Everywhere." Maestre defined unified communication (UC) as 

"more than voice, it's the experience. It includes voice, video, conferencing and customized customer applications." 

They believe that a UC should be accessible in all three aspects including the office, home, and mobile.

When asked for Polycom's difference with common internet video communication tools such as Skype, Maestre mentioned that there is a great difference in quality and consistency since polycom's communication tools are enterprise grade and not the usual consumer grade communication. And with their target market, namely the corporations and businesses,  the quality of communications is of prime importance.

Moreover, Polycom busted the usual video conferencing (VC) myths including misconceptions that VCs need high bandwidth, is expensive, difficalut to use, requires a room, is all the same, and only saves on travel.

The conference further focused on the three main points of technology, mobility, and cloud.

Technology

Their key point highlighted the standards-based H.264 Polycom scalable video coding (SVC) technology. The SVC technology is able to run quality "video conference with half the bandwidth."

This means there is no need to add capital investment on existing bandwidth since the SVC technology is able to maximize the current setup by as much as 50%.

Mobility

Part of polycom's moble UC strategy is powering up mobile gadgets on the consumer level. Proof of this is its support for the Android operating system. A few days ago, Samsung announced the agreement where Polycom will deliver UC solutions for Samsung's mobile platforms, particularly the development of standards-based video applications which is to be embedded on the Android-based Samsung Galaxy Tab. This is expected to be completed by 2011.

With over 7.6 million units* powered with Polycom technology, they are looking forward to support other tablets in the future as well.
*data from IDC

Cloud

The 'Cloud' system is one of Polycom's target growth areas moving forward. They are exploring to harness the potential of integrating the benefits that can be brought about via UC cloud services with Polycom Open Collaboration Network partner BroadSoft.

Another exploratory project is the Cloud-Open Exchange project which aims to improve end to end HD telepresence for integration.

“Video communications is at a tipping point. As new applications emerge, open interoperability and backwards compatibility are key to achieving widespread adoption and delivering value for customers.” says Joseph Burton, Polycom Chief Technology and Strategy Officer

With established relationships with IBM and Microsoft among others, Polycom has also partnered with HP early this year. In the Philippines, Polycom has ATI (American Technologies Inc.) as its proud partner.

"We look to a more productive 2010" adds Valladolid. He also pointed out that Polycom will continue to develop business-to-business (B2B) customer home applications within the idea "applications drive adoption."

As the only independent provider of video conferencing systems using open standard in the market and with over 2 million desktop video applications installed today, Polycom looks forward to further expand their technology to a number of platforms.