Poly

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Dec. 18, 2012 - Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM), the global leader in open standards-based unified communications and collaboration (UC&C), today announced general availability of a wave of breakthrough solutions unveiled on October 8 that are designed to accelerate widespread adoption of video collaboration.

 

The solutions available for purchase today deliver the industry's best end-to-end solution and include: the first open standards-based SVC support through enhancements to the Polycom RealPresence Platform; Polycom RealPresence Collaboration Server 800s, Virtual Edition - the industry's first multi-protocol, integrated software MCU that runs on industry-standard servers; new and updated video collaboration endpoints including Polycom RealPresence Desktop 2.0 software (for PCs and laptops), Polycom RealPresence Mobile 2.0 software, and Polycom RealPresence Group 300 and 500 solutions; and Polycom RealPresence Access Director™ technology. Polycom RealPresence Collaboration Server 800s, Virtual Edition, along with various new customized Platform offerings and next-generation Polycom RealPresence video endpoints, are part of a new mid-market portfolio.

 

The announcement furthers Polycom's aggressive initiative to bring to market next-generation UC&C solutions refined over two years of intensive R&D. Delivered on schedule, Polycom's new solutions offer the highest quality audio and video experience across an array of infrastructure components and user environments.

 

"In October, Polycom's announcements of breakthrough solutions raised the bar on enabling people to collaborate face-to-face over video, securely and reliably, no matter where they are located or what device or platform they want to use," said Sudhakar Ramakrishna, President of Products and Services, Polycom. "Now we're delivering on the vision we set out just a few weeks ago by bringing to market UC&C solutions that are simple to use, built around open standards, designed for enterprises and mid-sized companies, and giving users the best video collaboration experience. Furthermore, for the first time in the industry, we are enabling mixed SVC and AVC video environments without a gateway, allowing customers to increase scalability and dramatically reduce TCO."

 

Polycom is helping to make quality video collaboration accessible and ubiquitous by incorporating support for the industry's first implementation of open standards-based H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC) technology into the Polycom RealPresence Platform. Polycom's native support for SVC on the RealPresence Platform delivers 3X HD multipoint capacity for greater scalability and dramatically lower TCO, higher quality video performance, and long-term investment protection by providing backwards- and forwards- compatibility and interoperability without the need for expensive gateways or hardware. Scalability is important to customers as they bring video collaboration to more employees and onto more devices, such as PCs and tablets.

 

"Every day, more of our employees discover that communicating and collaborating face-to-face over video helps them get more done sooner, and improves their work-life balance by reducing business travel," said Dan Van Roekel, Telehealth Technology Manager at Sanford Health, the largest medical facility in the Fargo, North Dakota and Sioux Falls, South Dakota regions, dedicated to the work of healing. "Now we're able to upgrade our Polycom RealPresence infrastructure to support SVC. This is huge, not only because it is interoperable with our current video investments and gives us much more capacity, but because it also allows us to deliver the best quality video experience across all our user environments, including desktops, mobile devices, and group video systems."

 

The open standards-based SVC algorithm provides a multi-layered data structure that allows systems to adapt to networks to enhance the resolution, frame rate, and quality of video streams, and increase error resiliency, all without requiring excessive bandwidth or administrative intervention. This includes SVC enabling a video stream to be reduced in size automatically if there is a reduction in throughput (e.g., a connectivity bottleneck), allowing the viewer of a video meeting to keep the connection at a slightly lower resolution instead of getting a pause or a video freeze.

 

SVC support is available through software updates to components of the RealPresence Platform, including Polycom RealPresence Collaboration Server 7.8 (RMX), Polycom RealPresence Virtualization Manager 5.1 (DMA), and Polycom RealPresence Resource Manager 7.1 systems.

 

To address the unique needs of mid-sized organizations - including support for SVC and future protocols, and the ability to accommodate desktop and mobile environments - Polycom is delivering solutions configured and priced for organizations starting out with video, but still offering scalability to add users as companies grow.