Polycom ups telepresence ante

New software allows telepresence operators to work with many endpoints in a provisioned model, “that allows you to scale up quite large to up to 5000 endpoints,” Vandermaten said. “Instead of managing those individually, you can manage everything from the server, changing profiles, setting up classes of service and quality of service – all that is done at the service and pushed out into the network.”

“What we are seeing,” Roberts said, “is a lot of people becoming interested in visual communications – either it’s the hype around telepresence, or cost avoidance in travel or green initiatives. There are a variety of reasons driving people to explore visual conferencing. Companies may start by buying a system for their West Coast operations, but ultimately they want to leverage that to be accessible across the enterprise. And for a mobile person in the field, it can’t be a telepresence or conference room -- the desktop solutions has to be managed as well.”

The new software enables “buddy lists,” an easy point-and-click way for end-users to take advantage of presence technology to make and manage their video conferencing, Vandermaten said.

Polycom’s technology fits well into the managed services approach because of the centralized management, Vandermaten said.

As part of its announcement, Polycom also unveiled an expansion of its Polycom Arena ecosystem to include more than 60 partners, most recently GN Netcom, Mitel and Qumu.