A: There are lots of exciting changes and strong growth drivers that are propelling the market for unified communications (UC). First, we see an expanding market for UC both within and beyond the enterprise to SMB, mobile and consumer applications. This growth is driven by three factors: adoption of open standards and integration into best-of-breed UC solutions like Microsoft Lync; accessibility of telepresence solutions ranging from consumers and the mobile market to SMBs, enterprises and service providers; and the widespread availability of cost-effective bandwidth.

Second, the underlying business drivers for UC are increasing as more businesses of all sizes are operating globally and looking for ways to improve communication and collaboration across locations and time zones to accelerate decision making and time to market, and to lower operation costs and better leverage existing resources.

The market for Unified communications has immense potential. According to a Frost & Sullivan research study in 2009, the APAC market size of video conference-infrastructure is around 330-350 million dollars, of which, India’s contribution is around 9%. But, by 2015 this industry is expected to reach around 850- 900 million dollars and the growth in India is expected to be 15%.

A: The Polycom Open Collaboration Network (POCN) is a key strategy for Polycom that provides significant value for our customers. By working with leading unified communications platform providers, Polycom is able to deliver its productivity-enhancing and cost-saving telepresence, video and voice collaboration products as an integrated part of core unified communication environments, making the technologies easily accessible as part of the everyday workflow within a comprehensive solution that is easy to deploy and manage. Our strategic Polycom Open Collaboration Network partners include Microsoft, Avaya, Broad-Soft, HP, McAfee, IBM, Juniper Networks and Siemens. Through this initiative, our customers can stay assured their solutions continue to interoperate in a best-in-class environment, rather than being tied to one particular vendor.

A: It will definitely continue. In fact, we think 2011 and moving into 2012 will be when the service provider market for UC really gains momentum. One of Polycom’s key strategies is to enable the next generation of cloud-based services in conjunction with our service provider partners. We will do this by powering service provider networks through the Polycom UC Intelligent Core infrastructure platform, and by bringing together partners around standards and open interoperability to drive a network effect for customers.

A: In India, Polycom has a 2-tier distribution structure. There are 3 distributors and 50+ channel partners. By first quarter of 2011, Polycom will be launching ‘Polycom Choice Programme’ for defining its channel partners, their certification and growing their reach.

To enable service providers to deliver UC services reliably, cost-effectively and with a differentiated experience, Polycom is building the most scalable and robust platform to deliver these services through the Polycom UC Intelligent Core.

A: Consolidation is happening, but Polycom is winning in the market, because we remain focused on delivering greater customer value, flexibility and investment protection. Polycom believes it is critical to continue to innovate in a standards-based way and to provide seamless UC integration through our POCN partners, while also solving the interoperability challenges for our customers by connecting the islands of communications that exist between enterprise, mobile and consumer applications.

This is also proven through Polycom’s commitment to UC Everywhere, a strategy for seamlessly connecting communications across the continuum of consumer, mobility, SMB (small to medium businesses) and the enterprise, regardless of platform or network. These same innovations enable service providers to deploy open cloud-based UC telepresence services, giving customers the capability to communicate outside their organisations and across their supply chain to suppliers, partners and customers.

A: There is no doubt in my mind that real-time communications in the cloud is coming and will drive broader adoption, because it solves many of the issues limiting adoption today that we have discussed previously. However, you question is a good one. Regarding equipment installation, the barriers for businesses today is not actually plugging in the cameras and codecs, it is making sure they systems can easily connect across the network and between firewalls. The cloud will solve these issues. Areas like training, specialised lighting and sound, etc. provide a great opportunity for value-added services through service providers and channel partners.

One example is BT, which has created reference architectures to give customers the assurance that Microsoft and Polycom technologies will be deployed and managed in solutions that not only consider the server and software platform, but also at the full network impact and utilization.

A: Yes. Polycom believes there will be several major factors driving growth of telepresence. Polycom is helping to enable the cloud-based services that will simplify how customers purchase and use visual communications technologies like telepresence and make it easier to extend video use across business, mobile and consumer applications.

Regionally, there are two key areas that need to align so that you see growth, namely broadband infrastructure deployments and then industries see the bottom benefits of adopting the telepresence solutions.

Firstly the India government is very committed to the deployment of high speed networks both wireless and fixed broadband across the breadth of India, this then becomes the foundation to build from and we are working closely with them on this initiative.

Next, we have aligned with a number of key channel partners in India which include leading telecommunications player.  Together with these channel partners and our PCON partners, we are developing innovative solutions for many end user customers especially in the verticals of Government, Healthcare and Education.

A: The market is undergoing a sort of metamorphosis. We are seeing tremendous traction for open and interoperable technologies. Enterprises are realising multiple benefits by choosing open platforms based technologies. There is also confusion in the market, some of it propagated by other vendors, about the current state of interoperability. For example, we hear from Cisco Telepresence customers all the time that were promised interoperability, but find themselves locked behind proprietary walls. It is this customer demand that led us to support Cisco TIP on our infrastructure platform. We are breaking these customers out of the proprietary walls and providing a way to leverage their existing systems, but scale their network with standards-based solutions moving forward.

A: On the Healthcare front, organisations face challenges mainly in three areas; delivering quality patient care, streamlining care delivery processes, and improving business processes. These challenges are compounded by an environment with many time-dependent critical processes, multiple modes of communication, and many mobile caregivers and other workers with widely varying availability throughout the day. Polycom offers a portfolio of end-to-end, scalable, secure, Unified Collaborative solutions, which increases productivity of healthcare professionals, are used extensively for training of hospital staff, can extend patient care and expertise to remote areas, and also improve patient care with mobility solutions.

rahul.mani@9dot9.in