Polycom UC Intelligent Core Delivers Lowest Total Cost of Ownership, Increased Capacity, and Greatest Network Flexibility While Enabling True B2B Communication

Polycom bolsters UC Intelligent Core infrastructure to power communications with up to 50 per cent lower bandwidth requirements than the competition

29 Jul 2010 : Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM), a global leader in telepresence, video, and voice communications solutions, today announced enhancements to its visual communications infrastructure solution, the Polycom UC Intelligent Core, enabling customers to connect the most people in the highest quality at the lowest cost, both inside and outside their organisation.

Anchored by industry-leading bridging, virtualisation, management, scheduling and gatekeeping systems, the Polycom UC Intelligent Core enables broad delivery of secure, high-definition (HD) video services across organisations, including immersive telepresence, conference room and desktop video collaboration, live streaming, on-demand video content and digital signage. The open-standards based Polycom UC Intelligent Core is unique in delivering the broadest native integration with leading unified communications (UC) platforms, the lowest total cost of ownership versus competing solutions, the greatest network flexibility, scalability and redundancy, and superior investment protection.

"Broader video and telepresence deployments require a more advanced, more intelligent collaboration infrastructure that tightly integrates with leading IT processes and UC applications," said Andy Miller, president and CEO, Polycom. "This ensures a higher quality experience, simplified deployment and management, and scalability, reliability and redundancy. The Polycom UC Intelligent Core and its new advancements deliver the only open-standards platform addressing these requirements, connecting the most people in the highest quality at the lowest cost."

Intelligent Core for Unified Communications
At the heart of UC is the ability of infrastructure to enable teams to collaborate over voice and video anywhere, anytime—securely both inside and outside the firewall for business-to-business (B2B) communication. Polycom delivers the only integrated solution architected with built-in intelligence for broad-scale, mission-critical UC deployments. Leveraging its complete commitment to industry standards, the Polycom UC Intelligent Core supports the deepest native integration and interoperability with leading UC network platforms from Polycom Open Collaboration Network partners, including Microsoft, HP, IBM, Juniper, BroadSoft, Siemens, Avaya and others. The Polycom UC Intelligent Core is based on established standards and open interoperability allowing customers to cost-effectively migrate to advanced technologies and integrated unified communications while leveraging existing video conferencing investments.

"Polycom has made aggressive investments to its infrastructure in the recent year," said Roopam Jain, principal analyst, Conferencing and Collaboration, Frost & Sullivan. "These investments, coupled with leading the industry with adoption of the H.264 High Profile standard, and the push toward solution sales, make Polycom a strong vendor in the high-growth video conferencing market."

Key Differentiators
The Polycom UC Intelligent Core delivers substantially lower total cost of ownership versus competitors' solutions through lower bandwidth requirements, more efficient use of network resources, streamlined administrative requirements, and lower equipment, service and maintenance costs. Based on these factors, Polycom estimates a mid-sized enterprise will reduce first-year spend by as much as $2.1M for a typical Polycom telepresence deployment versus a comparable Cisco telepresence deployment. Other key differentiators of the new Polycom UC Intelligent Core releases include:

• H.264 High Profile for up to 50 per cent less bandwidth: Significant bandwidth savings are achieved with the new, advanced MPMx media processing modules for Polycom RMX® 1500, 2000 and 4000 conference bridges, which deliver HD telepresence using up to 50 per cent less bandwidth compared to Cisco/Tandberg solutions through industry leading support of the H.264 High Profile standard. Polycom leads the deployment of this advanced standard and is the only company to offer this bandwidth efficiency which provides customers significant cost savings.
• Bridge resource virtualisation for greater network capacity: To unite distributed environments and provide the greatest scalability, reliability and redundancy, while also lowering network administrative requirements and costs, the Polycom Distributed Media Application™ (DMA™) 7000 virtualises bridging resources across Polycom RMX media servers – 'combining' them when needed for greater full network capacity while allowing them to stand separately for maximum regional impact and lowest total cost of ownership. Leveraging the capabilities of the Polycom DMA and the unique dynamic resource allocation of the Polycom RMX bridges, the Polycom UC Intelligent Core delivers up to 3.5 times more capacity vs. Cisco/Tandberg in the typical mixed-call environments most organisations use today. With its latest software release, the Polycom DMA adds support for Tandberg Codian 4500 bridges extending scalability, reliability and redundancy beyond what Cisco/Tandberg offers for their own systems while also lowering the network administrative requirements and costs.
• RMX 1500 for more efficient bandwidth usage: Further cost reductions can be achieved by distributing bridging resources to the network edge for more efficient bandwidth usage. The new Polycom RMX 1500 is a flexible, mid-range conferencing platform designed to support branch offices, remote sites, and teleworkers, and runs on the same software platform as the full RMX series. The new MPMx media processing module is also the powerful core technology inside the new Polycom RMX 1500.

About Polycom
Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM) is a global leader in telepresence, video, and voice solutions and a visionary in communications that empower people to connect and collaborate everywhere. Please visit www.polycom.asia for more information and follow us on Twitter @PolycomAlert.

© 2010 Polycom, Inc. All rights reserved. POLYCOM®, the Polycom "Triangles" logo and the names and marks associated with Polycom's products are trademarks and/or service marks of Polycom, Inc. and are registered and/or common law marks in the United States and various other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Contacts

• Naomi Jackson
  Polycom, Inc.
  Tel: +61 416 541 544
  naomi.jackson@polycom.com