Polycom Telepresence Offers Customers Ultimate Flexibility

16 December 2009

Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM), the global leader in telepresence, video and voice communication solutions, today announced new capabilities available for its industry-leading immersive telepresence solutions that give customers greater flexibility in the use and management of immersive telepresence suites throughout their organization.

"Polycom offers the broadest range of immersive telepresence solutions and the greatest use, management and deployment flexibility to help customers get the most out of their investment," said Youssef Saleh, vice president and general manager of Telepresence and Vertical Solutions, Polycom.

Polycom immersive telepresence products include the Polycom RealPresence™ Experience (RPX™) line, the most immersive telepresence solution on the market, which provides a "same room" collaboration experience for up to 28 people in each location; the Polycom Telepresence Experience™ (TPX™) line, which provides an "across-the-table" experience for meetings; and the Polycom Architected Telepresence Experience™ (Polycom ATX), 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.

All Polycom telepresence solutions are standards-based and supported by an integrated Polycom infrastructure platform that delivers centralized management and provisioning; highly scalable multi-site, multi-network conferencing capabilities; network-aware firewall traversal; recording, streaming and video content management; integration with leading unified communications platforms, and interoperability with other standards-based immersive telepresence systems and legacy video conferencing equipment.

Polycom immersive telepresence solutions deliver unrivaled flexibility in:

Use and Management – Polycom supports a full range of management options based on customers' technical resource capabilities and needs. These options include fully managed telepresence services delivered through certified service partners, partially managed services delivered in combination with a certified service partner and in-house IT resources, and self-managed options facilitated by an organization's in-house IT staff. To assist customers in self-management, Polycom has delivered new capabilities that make it easier for users to initiate multi-site conferences without assistance from IT administrators. A new Meeting Composer tool allows users to simply 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™ (CMA™), 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.

In addition to simplified dialing, Polycom has also further simplified the user experience by automating screen layouts. 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.

Experience – Polycom immersive telepresence solutions allow customers to tailor the telepresence experience for their application requirements and user preferences. 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 the only systems on the market to support voice activated room switching for rooms with one to four screens.

Design and Integration – Polycom offers a range of immersive environments and configurations to support different application, space and capacity requirements. To expand integration flexibility for customers Polycom recently introduced the Polycom ATX 300, a telepresence kit featuring technology components and software that is combined with planning, design, and implementation services from qualified AV integrator partners to create customized solutions for a broad range of industries, applications and unique room requirements.

Support for Leading Unified Communications Environments – In addition to natively supporting calls with standards-based room and personal telepresence systems and video conferencing systems, Polycom telepresence solutions support interoperability with leading unified communications platforms from Avaya, Microsoft, IBM, Broadsoft and others. New capabilities include interoperability with Microsoft Office Communications Server 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.

Interoperability and Business to Business Communication – To help customers derive the greatest benefit and value from their investments in visual communication, Polycom telepresence solutions are based on open interoperability and established video conferencing standards, many of which Polycom has helped establish. This dedication to standards can extend the life and increase the value of investments by giving customers broader options for collaboration among a rapidly growing ecosystem of approximately two-million standards-based telepresence and video conferencing systems in use today.

Organizations of all sizes and across industries are adopting visual communication to enable people and teams to work more effectively and efficiently across distances both within and across organizations, which can lead to reduced operating costs by replacing the need to travel and reduced travel-associated carbon emissions. 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, Inc.1

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