Oct 8, 2012, SAN JOSE, Calif. and NEW YORK

 

Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM), the global leader in open standards-based unified communications (UC), today announced significant enhancements to the Polycom® RealPresence® Platform that make it an even more comprehensive and flexible software infrastructure for delivering video collaboration from private, public, and hybrid clouds. The new enhancements also make the RealPresence Platform  more universally accessible by ensuring multi-vendor interoperability, eliminating barriers to access, and bringing down the cost for enterprises to video-enable their organizations and for service providers to extend from Video-as-a-Service (VaaS) to expanded Video Collaboration-as-a-Service (VCaaS) offerings delivered from Polycom-powered clouds.

 

Today, Polycom introduced the industry’s first open standards-based Scalable Video Coding (SVC) protocol, delivering 3X the previous capacity for HD multipoint video calls for greater scalability, dramatically lower TCO, superior performance, and backwards- and forwards-compatibility to protect customer investments. Polycom also today introduced Polycom® RealPresence® Collaboration Server 800s, Virtual Edition, the industry’s first multi-protocol, integrated software MCU that runs on industry-standard servers.

 

In a related announcement, Polycom introduced RealPresence® CloudAXIS™ Suite, an extension of RealPresence Platform that lets customers extend enterprise-grade video collaboration to users of Skype®, Facebook®, Google Talk™, and business video and UC applications via a browser for B2B and B2C video conferencing with the highest quality, reliability, and security. (See related press release.)

 

“At Polycom, we continue to bolster our RealPresence Platform software infrastructure with interoperability enhancements designed to ensure customers are future-proofed and able to quickly leverage trends such as BYOD, mobile computing, and social networking that offer new opportunities to extend enterprise-grade video conferencing to the masses. Polycom is laser-focused on open standards-based interoperability for two key reasons:  first, to protect our customers’ investments and ensure backwards- and forwards-compatibility; second, to remove all impediments that limit the ubiquitous adoption of video collaboration,” said Sudhakar Ramakrishna, president of Products and Services, Polycom. “With today’s announcements, Polycom is delivering several industry firsts, such as the first open standards-based SVC implementation, which boosts multipoint capacity by 3X and works with other popular standards so that customers don’t need to rip and replace their current investments or buy expensive gateways required by competitive SVC offerings. In addition, Polycom is offering the industry’s first multi-protocol, integrated software MCU, RealPresence Collaboration Server 800s, Virtual Edition, which runs on industry-standard servers for greater flexibility and cost savings.”

 

Last week Polycom announced support for open standards-based SVC, an extension to AVC (Advanced Video Coding H.264), the standard coding protocol used by most of today’s video conferencing devices.

 

The open standards-based SVC algorithm provides a multi-layered data structure that allows systems to adapt to networks to enhance the resolution, frame rate, and quality of video streams, and increase error resiliency, all without requiring excessive bandwidth or administrative intervention. This includes SVC enabling a video stream to be reduced in size automatically if there is a reduction in throughput (e.g., a connectivity bottleneck), allowing the viewer of a video meeting to keep the connection at a slightly lower resolution instead of getting a pause or a video freeze.

 

Polycom took a rigorous, open standards-based approach to SVC, whereas other SVC implementations have experienced very limited success because they create closed environments that do not work with other vendors’ systems. This requires customers to either purchase expensive gateways or rip and replace their video investments. By providing native interoperability between the new SVC protocol and standards-based protocols such as AVC, the RealPresence Platform bridges “video islands” caused by earlier, closed implementations of SVC. This interoperability protects customer investments through backwards-compatibility with AVC and other protocols and forwards-compatibility with SVC and future open standards-based protocols that may emerge.

 

Polycom’s standards-based SVC implementation is built on a framework developed by the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCI Forum), a non-profit network of technology vendors with a shared vision of UC interoperability, and Polycom is licensing its SVC implementation free of charge to the UCI Forum and others to ensure adoption and industry-wide interoperability.

 

Polycom’s SVC implementation provides significant customer benefits, including 3X HD multi-point video capacity for greater scalability, dramatically lower TCO, and superior performance. Scalability is important to customers as they bring video collaboration to more employees and onto more devices, such as PCs and tablets.

 

“Delivering open standards-based SVC is a bold move for Polycom, and critical for the industry,” said Jim Lundy, CEO and lead analyst at Aragon Research. “While SVC provides significant cost, performance, and scalability benefits to customers, until now it has seen limited success because other SVC protocols are proprietary, creating ‘video islands’ and running up implementation costs for customers.”

 

SVC support is available through software updates to components of the RealPresence® Platform, including RealPresence® Collaboration Server 7.8 and 8.1 (RMX), RealPresence® Resource Manager 7.1, and RealPresence® Vir