Unified communications innovator Polycom Inc. made a number of announcements this month highlighting new products for video collaboration and mobile productivity. The announcements, according to Polycom, are the “culmination of over two years of R&D efforts focused on … making video collaboration easier to use and manage, universally accessible, more scalable at a lower cost, more affordable for SMBs, more interoperable, and more sleek and powerful for business users on their desktop.”
Key among those recent announcements was the unveiling of Polycom RealPresence CloudAXIS Suite, a new extension to the Polycom RealPresence Platform. The extension helps to provide enterprise-grade video collaboration to users of Skype, Facebook, Google Talk, and other business video applications via a browser.
“Our passion at Polycom is to make video collaboration simple to use and available to everyone,” says Polycom CEO Andy Miller. “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. We believe this launch of next-generation video solutions will set a new industry standard for 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 organizations.”
In the largest product launch in the Polycom history, the company is adding several new communications-focused products to its portfolio. †
RealPresence CloudAXIS Suite
The RealPresence CloudAXIS Suite runs on the Polycom RealPresence Platform in private enterprise clouds or public cloud deployments. It and securely extends enterprise-grade video and content collaboration outside the firewall to users of Skype, Facebook, Google Talk, and other business video applications via a browser. RealPresence CloudAXIS Suite is ideal for Polycom partners and service providers to expand from offering Video-as-a-Service to Video Collaboration-as-a-Service, adding applications (recording and streaming), web conferencing, and collaboration tools.
RealPresence Platform
Enhancements to the Polycom RealPresence Platform include support for the implementation of open standards-based Scalable Video Coding technology. This implementation delivers 3X HD multipoint capacity for greater scalability and dramatically lower TCO, higher quality video performance across devices, and interoperability for backwards- and forwards-compatibility. SVC support is available through software updates to components of the RealPresence Platform, including RealPresence Collaboration Server 7.8 and 8.1, Resource Manager 7.1, and Virtualization Manager 5.1.
“Microsoft is enthusiastic to see Polycom’s licensing of open standards-based SVC technology as it provides the foundation to deliver interoperable solutions that our joint customers demand,” says Warren Barkley, Microsoft’s general manager of Lync customer and partner engineering.
Polycom also introduced Polycom RealPresence Collaboration Server 800s, Virtual Edition, a multi-protocol, integrated software MCU that runs on industry-standard servers.
Polycom UX
The new Polycom UX delivers a video collaboration experience with more than 20 new user innovations and features, including a completely redesigned UI and lifelike HD image quality (up to 1080p60 resolution) as well as patent-pending Polycom SmartPairing technology, and video, content sharing, and audio features.
Group Series & VisualEdge Executive Desktop
Polycom’s video collaboration endpoints range from new systems for rooms of all sizes to a sleek and powerful executive desktop system to enhanced software for PCs, laptops, tablets and smartphones:
- Group Series (300, 500 and 700) – These RealPresence solutions are HD video collaboration systems for both rooms and budgets of all sizes.
- VisualEdge – The RealPresence VisualEdge delivers ultra-slim (less than 1-inch thick) and sleek design, along with powerful executive desktop video collaboration experiences with the highest video resolution (up to 1080p60) and largest screen (27-inch) in its category and can serve as a PC display.†
- Desktop 2.0 Software & Mobile 2.0 – Video is extended beyond the conference room with these developments, designed to deliver video collaboration to more users in more environments.
Multi-Vendor Interoperability
Polycom’s new offerings provide multi-vendor integration with support for both open-standards and proprietary protocols, including H.263, H.264 High Profile, RTV (Microsoft), TIP, and now SVC.† Polycom RealPresence solutions connect to existing standards-based UC solutions (whether Microsoft, Cisco, Avaya, IBM, Siemens, HP, or mixed).
