“India is one of the most important markets for Polycom”

Neeraj Gill, Managing Director, Polycom India & SAARC, spoke to Manjari Juneja about the evolving Unified Communications market in India

Neeraj Gill

How do you think Unified Communications (UC) has evolved in India?

In response to transformation, two key strategies have emerged for enterprises moving forward—convergence and collaboration. Unified Communications links these two strategies. A challenge faced by most organizations is that immediate and full end-to-end UC implementation is prohibitive and to do so would require an expensive and disruptive rip/replace approach. The approach being taken by most organizations is a phased implementation, transitioning to UC through project sized steps.

The business value to Unified Communications can only be achieved if the workforce has the proper set of everyday communication solutions that provide for an effective human interface and a rich user experience.

Beginning at its collaboration core, Polycom provides a solutions architecture throughout the enterprise to provide robust communications management and conferencing platforms which directly interface with the UC ecosystem for fully interoperable call control and offer a complete portfolio of high definition voice, video and telepresence collaboration solutions that provide an easy to use and best in class user experience throughout the enterprise.

Customers today demand that their mission-critical UC environment—from conferencing bridges, HD video and audio endpoints that deliver life-like experience; to immersive telepresence systems; to management applications and global support infrastructure—all work seamlessly together. Integration with their existing multi-vendor communication infrastructure is critical to protect investments.

What is the scope of Visual Communication in 2010?

Video conferencing and telepresence solutions help organizations to work faster, smarter, cheaper, more effectively and efficiently across distances to keep business moving forward. Time is money, and Polycom telepresence and video conferencing solutions turns travel time into effective time for maximum organizational efficiency. Indeed, our customers tell us that the time they save by not travelling is more valuable than the dollars saved.

Some of the direct benefits of video collaboration with dispersed workforce, vendors and suppliers are: Operational efficiency—reduce travel downtime; increase productivity and efficiency by converting travel time to effective time. Business continuity—irrespective of location continue to meet customers and team through face-to-face video collaboration meetings. Competitive advantage—reduce time to market by collaborating over video for swift business decisions. Tele-working—maintain a sustainable business that leverages flexible work practices and minimizes environmental impacts whilst allowing organizations to take advantage of geographically distributed resources. Reduce travel costs—get Rapid ROI from your video conferencing equipments.

We have witnessed faster adoption of visual communication in enterprises and the trend would continue. Video will also gain more significance in UC deployments and therefore enterprises would be looking at solutions that are interoperable.

How is Polycom planning to maintain the leadership in this space?

Polycom is the only solutions provider with nearly 20 years as a global communications leader that bases all of its voice, video and HD telepresence products on open standards. This assures complete interoperability which means people can connect on any voice or video communications device they choose—and as simply as placing a telephone call. As a result, Polycom customers see teamwork and productivity go up. Travel and operating costs go down. Businesses become more effective and see a fast ROI. That’s why thousands of organizations around the world choose Polycom to connect and collaborate everywhere.

Polycom also continues to lead technological innovation with new products being rolled out for varied needs of customer segments. Polycom has the largest customer base in the world with shipments of more than 750,000 video systems. With the changing business landscape Polycom is positioned as the best partner for telepresence, video and voice conferencing solutions.

What is your product portfolio to cater to different industry sectors?

In a world in which economic drivers such as globalization, outsourcing, off-shoring, telecommuting and mobile workforces have created dispersed teams and added cultural complexity to how people relate, the ability to communicate and share information in real-time over any device and across any network is a distinct competitive advantage.

Using Polycom telepresence, video, and voice solutions and services, people connect and collaborate from their desktops, meeting rooms, class rooms, and mobile settings. That’s why more Global 2000 and Fortune 500 companies worldwide use Polycom solutions to connect people, ideas, and insights.

Polycom Telepresence Solutions include the Polycom RealPresence Experience (RPX) line; the Polycom Telepresence Experience (TPX) line; and the Polycom Architected Telepresence Experience (Polycom ATX). Polycom also offers a range of room telepresence products for small to large meeting rooms and personal telepresence products for executive offices and desktops.

Polycom Video Conferencing Solutions, with supporting infrastructure and management tools, deliver powerful, high definition visual communication experiences across desktops, meeting rooms, lecture halls, immersive environments, and more.

Polycom Voice Solutions is critical to the success of your meetings. From a single phone line and wireless communications to large installed voice and video systems, Polycom voice solutions make audio sound clear and natural. Calls are more productive and efficient when participants can hear clear, crisp voice quality—even during simultaneous conversations.

What are Polycom's plans for India?

India is one of the most important markets for Polycom. Besides sales and marketing offices at Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore and Kolkata, Polycom has its R&D facilities at Hyderabad which focuses on next generation voice solutions.

Polycom will continue to drive greater alignment with end customers; work with our partners and strategic alliances like Microsoft, IBM, Juniper and Avaya to provide best-of-the-breed and interoperable telepresence, video and voice solutions in overall UC landscape.