Poly

 

PLEASANTON, Calif. - Jan 31, 2012 : Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM), the global leader in standards-based unified communications (UC), today announced the appointments of two senior engineering executives, Rick Levenson and A.E. Natarajan, who together bring 50+ years of experience to Polycom, to further drive video collaboration adoption through innovations in the Polycom® RealPresence™ Platform and a wide range of video-enabled devices. Levenson and Natarajan will report to Sudhakar Ramakrishna, executive vice president and general manager of UC solutions and chief development officer.

 

Levenson will lead the "UC Devices" engineering team, responsible for designing and delivering amazing user experiences for RealPresence video collaboration solutions in healthcare, education, government, manufacturing, and other industries. The team will design user experiences across various environments (on the road, at home, at work, in conference rooms or immersive theatres) and devices (smart phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, and office and room systems). Natarajan will lead Polycom's RealPresence Platform engineering efforts, focusing on platform infrastructure that spans UC environments from the enterprise to the cloud. The Polycom RealPresence Platform is the most comprehensive software infrastructure for universal video collaboration, and delivers the industry's only universal bridging software that supports up to 75,000 device registrations and 25,000 concurrent sessions.

 

"Polycom believes in pushing the greatness of human collaboration forward by making video collaboration simple to use and available to everyone through open, standards-based software—delivered on–premises or from the cloud—that connects people securely across any network, protocol, application or device they want to use. A key part of our strategy is to drive the network effect for video collaboration in new and emerging markets such as social, mobile, and cloud-delivered video," said Ramakrishna. "A.E. and Rick bring a wealth of experience in managing large development teams and projects, in areas such as software development, mobility, infrastructure, and the cloud, and they join an engineering team that is one of high-tech's most formidable innovation engines. Together with our existing engineering leadership, we expect A.E. and Rick to continue to create game-changing technologies that bring secure video collaboration to more people, places, devices, and use cases as the best way to collaborate with anyone from anywhere."

 

Polycom has more than 800 patents issued or pending worldwide and has received over 100 awards for excellence. Polycom innovations in audio, visual, touch-screen, and networking technologies have set the standard for delivering an exceptionally easy-to-use and lifelike video collaboration experience that improves engagement and productivity.

 

Levenson, a software and human factors expert, has extensive experience in a wide variety of environments, from nascent start-ups through large industry research labs, running organizations in Europe, Asia, and across the U.S. Levenson joins Polycom from Microsoft's Speech Cloud Services team and was formerly SVP of products at Tellme Networks (acquired by Microsoft in 2007). Levenson has also held key engineering roles at Sun Microsystems (including JavaSoft), Xerox PARC and Openwave. He is co-inventor on issued patents related to video-enhanced, digital communications toolkits, and managed organizations that have filed dozens of patents (25 issued). Levenson holds a bachelor's degree in Theoretical Mathematics from U.C. Berkeley, and a master's degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.

 

"I've spent most of my career at the intersection of technology and human communications, and I'm excited to join Polycom, a company that is focused on communications and collaboration," said Levenson. "I thrive in industries that are evolving and growing, and I look forward to creating technologies at Polycom that change people's everyday lives."

 

Natarajan joins Polycom from Cisco Systems, where he was a vice president of engineering, leading a large team of engineers across several geographies, and helping to grow several multi-billion dollar product lines. He is an expert in enterprise IT, service provider networking, internetworking, and security, with more than 20 years of industry experience. Natarajan has also worked at Novell and several start-ups, and is a recognized industry evangelist for driving many standards in networking and information security. Natarajan holds a bachelor's degree in Electrical and Electronics from University of Madras, and a master's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras.

 

"There are significant market transformations occurring with video and cloud today, both in the enterprise and with service providers," said Natarajan. "Polycom has an excellent leadership team and engineering talent pool, and I'm excited to join this winning team and help Polycom capitalize on this transformation."