Polycom announces industry-transforming, breakthrough solutions as Gitex approaches

Polycom expects the market to grow to nearly $12bn in 2015, at a 16% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate).

Today's announcements are the culmination of over two years of R&D efforts focused on augmenting Polycom's portfolio and removing the impediments to video adoption by making video collaboration easier to use and manage, universally accessible, more scalable at a lower cost, more affordable for small to medium-size enterprises, more interoperable, and more sleek and powerful for business users on their desktop.

"Our passion at Polycom is to make video collaboration simple to use and available to everyone. Today, we are introducing breakthrough solutions that we believe take ease of use and universal access to exciting new levels, while extending and protecting investments customers have made in Polycom's interoperable, open standards-based platform and solutions," said Andy Miller, CEO, Polycom.

"We believe this launch of next-generation video solutions will set a new industry standard for best user experience for both end users and IT administrators, and will also provide a seamless and extensible path for customers to fully video-enable their organisations," added Miller.

"A number of impediments have hampered the mass adoption of video conferencing including too many closed video 'islands' and the limited scalability of traditional video solutions," said Ira M. Weinstein, senior analyst and partner, Wainhouse Research.

"With this set of announcements, Polycom is tackling these adoption barriers head-on by making video conferencing easier to deploy, easier to use, and easier to scale without forcing forklift upgrades. This is the type of innovation and vision that made Polycom an early market leader in video collaboration. Make no mistake - we are seeing Polycom 2.0," Weinstein said.

In the largest product launch in the Company's history, Polycom is delivering a portfolio of next-generation products and solutions - fully backward- and forward-compatible - that extend the delivery of video collaboration to more endpoints, more environments and more people. Polycom's innovative new portfolio of offerings includes:

Polycom RealPresence Platform Delivers 3X HD Video Capacity Via Open Standards-Based SVC, and First Multi-Protocol, Integrated Software MCU for Industry-Standard Servers.

• Powerful enhancements to the RealPresence Platform include support for the industry's first implementation of open standards-based Scalable Video Coding (SVC) technology. This implementation delivers 3X HD multipoint capacity for greater scalability and dramatically lower TCO, higher quality video performance across devices, and breakthrough interoperability for backwards- and forwards-compatibility—protecting customers' video investments and eliminating the need for expensive gateways or hardware required by competitive proprietary SVC products. The significant boost in capacity is important as customers bring video to more users, and as trends such as BYOD (bring your own device), mobile computing, and social networking extend enterprise-grade video conferencing to the masses.

Polycom is licensing its open standards-based SVC implementation royalty free to the industry, including the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCI Forum), to ensure adoption and industry-wide interoperability.

• Polycom also introduced Polycom RealPresence Collaboration Server 800s, Virtual Edition, the industry's first multi-protocol, integrated software MCU that runs on industry-standard servers. It is ideal for mid-sized enterprises such as professional service firms, private healthcare institutions, and investment firms, as well as for larger organisations with branch offices, and represents a significant step forward in delivering virtualised video collaboration from the datacentre, resulting in even greater flexibility and lower cost.

Polycom's next-generation portfolio includes solutions available to customers of all sizes, including a specific portfolio designed for mid-market customers, to deliver affordable solutions that are easy to use and manage. The mid-market portfolio includes: RealPresence Collaboration Server 800s, Virtual Edition; high quality and affordable RealPresence Group 300 for smaller spaces or huddle rooms; RealPresence Desktop 2.0 and RealPresence Mobile 2.0.

Multi-Vendor Interoperability for Investment Protection

Polycom's new offerings provide the broadest multi-vendor integration with support for open-standards and proprietary protocols, including H.263, H.264 High Profile, RTV (Microsoft), TIP, and now SVC. Polycom RealPresence solutions connect to millions of existing standards-based UC solutions (whether Microsoft, Cisco, Avaya, IBM, Siemens, HP, or mixed) and potentially hundreds of millions of future SVC-based solutions on leading UC platforms such as Microsoft Lync.

Availability

Polycom plans to make available the Polycom RealPresence CloudAXIS Suite to enterprises in Q1 2013, and also plans to make available trials for service providers in Q1 2013. Polycom The Polycom EagleEye Acoustic camera will be available in November 2012. The Polycom RealPresence Group Series 300 and 500 are available to order now. RealPresence Group 700 will be available in December 2012. Polycom plans to make Polycom RealPresence VisualEdge available in April 2013. Polycom RealPresence Mobile 2.0 will be available as a free download from the Apple AppStore and Google Play in November 2012. Polycom RealPresence Desktop 2.0 for Windows will be available in November 2012 and for Apple Mac OS X the availability is planned for the first-half 2013. Initially, SmartPairing will run on the iPad 2 and the new iPad, with capabilities to connect to the enhanced Polycom HDX Series v.3.1 and the Polycom RealPresence Group Series. Polycom plans to make available SmartPairing to the Polycom RealPresence VisualEdge in the first-half of 2013. The new UI will be available initially on the Polycom RealPresence Group Series, and is planned to be available soon after on RealPresence Desktop 2.0, Polycom RealPresence Mobile 2.0, and Polycom RealPresence VisualEdge. Support for up to 1080p60 resolutions will be available on Polycom RealPresence Group Series and Polycom RealPresence VisualEdge. NoiseCancel technology will initially be available on the Polycom RealPresence VisualEdge.