The Sky is the limit

people to the centre of collaboration.
• Polycom® RealPresence® Debut brings
enterprise grade video collaboration to
the huddle room with a focus on simplicity
and affordability. RealPresence Debut has
an easy, elegant design that enables high
quality visual collaboration for huddle and
smaller room environments, as well as for
small or medium sized businesses with
limited IT resources.
• Polycom® RealPresence® Media Suite is
an enterprise recording, webcasting and
portal solution that makes the creation and
delivery of higher quality videos possible.
A central management console enables
simple workflows to manage media nodes
remotely.
• Polycom® RealPresence ClaritiTM is a
collaboration infrastructure that delivers
Polycom’s powerful HD voice, content, video
and web collaboration to businesses of any
size is also available for demonstrations
during GITEX.
Please tell us about the RealPresence
Centro in more detail?
Glynn: The whole genesis is the design of the
Centro that supports video collaboration and
audio web collaboration in a way that people
already use to collaborate which is sitting
around in a table whereas the traditional
video conferencing tends to be hanging on
the wall in one room while everybody is up
to that moment so it really does support
this concept that people can collaborate
in a more natural way. The video is end to
end - with this solution you collaborate with
people with you as well as on the other end
of the video and supports several systems.
From a technology perspective, its touch
screen and works with Skype. Every product
that we have whether its mobile plans,
desktop solutions, Immersive studios which
you have seen in the past are all supporting
Skype for business. So it gives the customers
the option to decide which way they want
to go or both ways. But again, like all of
our other solutions when you use the
conjunction for our infrastructure you can
bring others into that collaboration on oneto-one
basis from smart phones, to tablets
to desktops or the room systems. So you
can actually use the opportunity to draw
in during a discussion for a subject of your
interest and then leave while rest of the
conference continues. With the full touch
screen, you have got options for data as
well, you can use high quality LED displays
that you can use to draw in, presenting and
other services.
Bandwidth plays a very important role in
Video Collaboration – could you please tell
us about your expertise in this area?
Marco: We constantly work to optimize
quality of the video and the audio to make
it better but we always use less and less
bandwidth so that we can reach more
possibilities. You can do video conferencing
on a phone in a 3G area. For example,
earlier an employee was in South Africa
he literally stopped on the roadside to do
video conferencing and even when he is
travelling by road, I am getting good quality
from an IPhone using RealPresence video
conferencing on 3G. So basically, without
getting into too much technical detail, what
we have is our own technology embedded
in our software and we are using end point
power so you will always get good quality
and high definition audio irrespective of
regular packet loss.
One of your key partners is Microsoft who
have Skype for Business – with Skype
providing video conferencing on its own,
where does Polycom come in?
Marco: It goes down to where we started
- it goes down to the quality of the video
and the flexibility we offer. We can connect
more devices and we can connect them with
higher quality so Microsoft needs us there.
And with such integrated software they can
reach more consumers. We bring in a lot of
specific expertise into this scenario. A lot
of things that add on to the basic video call
function – as I have said before, we are more
about Collaboration and video is just a part
of it.
Polycom recently conducted research on
“Examining Video Collaboration at the
Workplace”. Could you please tell us about
the findings?
Marco: The Polycom commissioned YouGov
survey highlights that employees across
the UAE have a positive outlook towards
video collaboration as it allows them to work
more effectively from anywhere and derive
the benefits of strong internal and external
business collaboration.
Employees in the UAE also believe that the
option of video collaboration in a workplace
allows for flexible working and working from
anywhere. 90% of employees say that the
ability to video helps them enjoy the main
benefits of flexible working, which includes
the ability to balance work and family
responsibilities, be more productive and be
more satisfied with their jobs.
How is the company evolving overtime
with respect to strategy?
Glynn: We have been acquired by a private
organization called Siris Capital Group LLC
on September 27th and from the strategic
perspective we are still focusing on growing.
The key drive is to continue to develop our
relationship with Microsoft.
We are aiming to bring new audio, content
and video innovations to the market so we
can bring the collaboration capability closer
to a much wider audience. If you look at
video collaboration market from a few years
ago, everything was very much positioned to
sell it as a boardroom solution. The need for
this boardroom solution is still strengthening
and in addition, we are making sure we
extend the video collaboration outwards
and downwards so it’s available to anybody,
whoever they are and wherever they are so
they can work from any location and at any
time. This is the future of work as work is no
longer a place you got to but a thing you do
and you should be able to do this thing from
anywhere.
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