Polycom Top-Ranked for Video Collaboration ‘Strategy’ and ‘Current Offerings’ in New Report from Leading Independent
Research Firm
Polycom receives perfect scores in the categories of quality of experience, interoperability, product roadmap,
partnerships and security and compliance
New Zealand – August 23, 2012 – Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM), the global leader in open standards-based unified communications (UC), today announced that Forrester
Research Inc. named Polycom a leader and top-ranked Company in both ‘current offerings’ and ‘strategy’ in a new report
on video collaboration solutions.
The report, titled “The Forrester Wave™: Room-Based Videoconferencing, Q3 2012,” uses 39 criteria to evaluate the top
vendors in the industry, looking at video collaboration solutions for every work environment – from mobile and desktops
to room systems and immersive telepresence – along with the services that support them. Forrester found that Polycom has
taken the top scores in ‘current offerings’ based on such factors as conferencing experience, quality of experience,
management platform, recording and streaming and security and compliance, all for which Polycom was also top-ranked. In
the ‘strategy’ category, Forrester named Polycom a leader largely because of its product roadmap and particular
strengths in “UC integration” and “interoperability”—a key focus of and competitive advantage for Polycom and its global
ecosystem of over 7,000 partners. In addition, Polycom was top ranked in the “partners” category. (Download the full report here).
“As Forrester notes in its new ‘Wave’ report, Polycom is now top-ranked in ‘current offerings’ for video collaboration.
Polycom today is delivering the most useful innovations, best user experiences and broadest interoperability of any
video collaboration company,” said Polycom CEO Andy Miller. “Importantly, Forrester also named Polycom the top-ranked
company in ‘strategy’— which we see as validation from an important thought leader that Polycom is on the right track
with our vision to make video collaboration ubiquitous through an innovative roadmap and by offering the industry’s best
user experience. Polycom will also continue to offer the industry’s broadest multi-vendor integration and lowest TCO.
For our more than 415,000 customers globally, Polycom is delivering innovations in video collaboration that are changing
the way people work, collaborate, learn, govern, create and even help save lives.”
“Polycom has a diverse portfolio of endpoints including a range of options that run the gamut from mobile and room-based
systems to immersive telepresence,” wrote Phillip Karcher, the author of the Forrester Research report. “Through
technology partnerships, with Microsoft in particular, Polycom provides endpoints that work well in multi-vendor
environments. Many of its endpoints also interoperate natively with nonstandard protocols and codecs.”
Video Collaboration Is Becoming More Ubiquitous, Forrester Finds
The Forrester Wave report also discusses the growing interest in “face to face” video collaboration, which is helping
businesses increase productivity, improve employee engagement and trust and lower costs.
“In a work culture dominated by virtual meetings, more firms are looking to videoconferencing to replicate the in-person
experience that employees prefer – or at least make voice conversations more engaging by fostering the trust and
improved communications that comes with being able to read the other person’s body language,” wrote Forrester in the
report. “Mobile executives want video for better work-life balance, managers want it to see that their direct reports
aren’t distracted and multicultural organisations want it to foster the trust and improved communication that comes with
being able to read the body language of remote team members.”
Also, according to Forrester’s report: “Videoconferencing innovation today is happening on smaller screens like PCs,
smartphones and tablets that workers use in their everyday jobs. In response to the growing interest, vendors not only
have to show strategies that account for desktop and mobile applications – they also have to make their traditional
dedicated room-based systems easier to deploy at scale.”
Polycom RealPresence Video Collaboration Solutions
Polycom RealPresence video collaboration solutions deliver secure, high-quality video to companies of all sizes, so that
teams can meet face-to-face with colleagues, partners and customers anywhere people workin the office, at home, on the
go, or on the manufacturing floor, in a hospital or, at a movie set. Polycom offers the broadest range of video
collaboration solutions in the industry including:
•RealPresence Immersive video theaters that provide the experience of being in the same room with other participantslife-sized and eye-to-eye.
Polycom provides the industry’s best immersive video experience, with cinema-like video quality, crystal-clear HD audio
with tailored acoustics and personal content monitors, creating a real-as-life remote group collaboration experience
that makes the distance and technology invisible.
•
•Room solutions that facilitate enterprise-grade video collaboration, regardless of room size or budget. Polycom®
RealPresence™ Room (HDX® Series) video solutions are secure, easy to operate and consistently deliver a flawless visual
communications experience. Polycom RealPresence Room solutions make it simple for people to meet face-to-face and share
HD-quality content with peers, partners and customers wherever they may be located.
•
•Desktop systems that deliver HD video collaboration to the personal workspace, including to PCs and laptops.
•
• Award-winning Real Presence Mobile, which extends video collaboration beyond the office to leading Apple and Android smartphones and tablets.
•
• Innovative video and UC solutions such as Polycom® EagleEye Director, the most intelligent UC camera , which delivers breakthrough HD experiences by automatically zooming in on the active
speaker in the room as they talk or walk; and Polycom® UC Board™, which transforms ordinary surfaces into virtual whiteboards.
•
•
These solutions are powered by the Polycom RealPresence Platform, the most comprehensive and interoperable infrastructure for universal video collaboration. The RealPresence Platform
provides the robust provisioning, management, scalability, reliability, flexibility and security required both for video
enterprises and their private video clouds serving thousands of users, as well as for Video-as-a-Service (VaaS)
delivered from the cloud potentially to tens of millions. Because of Polycom's focus on interoperability, the
RealPresence Platform works with hundreds of UC and business apps, transforming islands of employees and fragmented
communications systems into a seamless video enterprise where enterprise-grade video is easily and securely available to
all authorised personnel whether they're mobile, remote, or on-site. Polycom recently announced a rich new suite of open APIs for developers, partners and service providers to integrate business apps such as billing, scheduling, directory,
management and monitoring with the Platform, extending the value of RealPresence video solutions to new industries, new
use cases and new users.
About Polycom
Polycom is the global leader in open standards-based unified communications (UC) solutions for telepresence, video, and voice powered by the Polycom RealPresence Platform. The RealPresence Platform interoperates with the broadest
range of business, mobile, and social applications and devices. More than 400,000 organisations trust Polycom solutions
to collaborate and meet face-to-face from any location for more productive and effective engagement with colleagues,
partners, customers, specialists and prospects. Polycom, together with its broad partner ecosystem, provides customers
with the best total cost of ownership, interoperability, scalability, and security for video collaboration – whether
on-premises, hosted, or cloud-delivered. Visit www.polycom.asia or connect with Polycom on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
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