Polycom Top-Ranked for Video Collaboration

Polycom Top-Ranked for Video Collaboration ‘Strategy’ and ‘Current Offerings’ in New Report from Leading Independent Research Firm

Polycom receives perfect scores in the categories of quality of experience, interoperability, product roadmap, partnerships and security and compliance

New Zealand – August 23, 2012 – Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM), the global leader in open standards-based unified communications (UC), today announced that Forrester Research Inc. named Polycom a leader and top-ranked Company in both ‘current offerings’ and ‘strategy’ in a new report on video collaboration solutions.

The report, titled “The Forrester Wave™: Room-Based Videoconferencing, Q3 2012,” uses 39 criteria to evaluate the top vendors in the industry, looking at video collaboration solutions for every work environment – from mobile and desktops to room systems and immersive telepresence – along with the services that support them. Forrester found that Polycom has taken the top scores in ‘current offerings’ based on such factors as conferencing experience, quality of experience, management platform, recording and streaming and security and compliance, all for which Polycom was also top-ranked. In the ‘strategy’ category, Forrester named Polycom a leader largely because of its product roadmap and particular strengths in “UC integration” and “interoperability”—a key focus of and competitive advantage for Polycom and its global ecosystem of over 7,000 partners. In addition, Polycom was top ranked in the “partners” category. (Download the full report here).

“As Forrester notes in its new ‘Wave’ report, Polycom is now top-ranked in ‘current offerings’ for video collaboration. Polycom today is delivering the most useful innovations, best user experiences and broadest interoperability of any video collaboration company,” said Polycom CEO Andy Miller. “Importantly, Forrester also named Polycom the top-ranked company in ‘strategy’— which we see as validation from an important thought leader that Polycom is on the right track with our vision to make video collaboration ubiquitous through an innovative roadmap and by offering the industry’s best user experience. Polycom will also continue to offer the industry’s broadest multi-vendor integration and lowest TCO. For our more than 415,000 customers globally, Polycom is delivering innovations in video collaboration that are changing the way people work, collaborate, learn, govern, create and even help save lives.”

“Polycom has a diverse portfolio of endpoints including a range of options that run the gamut from mobile and room-based systems to immersive telepresence,” wrote Phillip Karcher, the author of the Forrester Research report. “Through technology partnerships, with Microsoft in particular, Polycom provides endpoints that work well in multi-vendor environments. Many of its endpoints also interoperate natively with nonstandard protocols and codecs.”

Video Collaboration Is Becoming More Ubiquitous, Forrester Finds

The Forrester Wave report also discusses the growing interest in “face to face” video collaboration, which is helping businesses increase productivity, improve employee engagement and trust and lower costs.

“In a work culture dominated by virtual meetings, more firms are looking to videoconferencing to replicate the in-person experience that employees prefer – or at least make voice conversations more engaging by fostering the trust and improved communications that comes with being able to read the other person’s body language,” wrote Forrester in the report. “Mobile executives want video for better work-life balance, managers want it to see that their direct reports aren’t distracted and multicultural organisations want it to foster the trust and improved communication that comes with being able to read the body language of remote team members.”

Also, according to Forrester’s report: “Videoconferencing innovation today is happening on smaller screens like PCs, smartphones and tablets that workers use in their everyday jobs. In response to the growing interest, vendors not only have to show strategies that account for desktop and mobile applications – they also have to make their traditional dedicated room-based systems easier to deploy at scale.”

Polycom RealPresence Video Collaboration Solutions

Polycom RealPresence video collaboration solutions deliver secure, high-quality video to companies of all sizes, so that teams can meet face-to-face with colleagues, partners and customers anywhere people workin the office, at home, on the go, or on the manufacturing floor, in a hospital or, at a movie set. Polycom offers the broadest range of video collaboration solutions in the industry including:

• RealPresence Immersive video theaters that provide the experience of being in the same room with other participantslife-sized and eye-to-eye. Polycom provides the industry’s best immersive video experience, with cinema-like video quality, crystal-clear HD audio with tailored acoustics and personal content monitors, creating a real-as-life remote group collaboration experience that makes the distance and technology invisible.
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• Room solutions that facilitate enterprise-grade video collaboration, regardless of room size or budget. Polycom® RealPresence™ Room (HDX® Series) video solutions are secure, easy to operate and consistently deliver a flawless visual communications experience. Polycom RealPresence Room solutions make it simple for people to meet face-to-face and share HD-quality content with peers, partners and customers wherever they may be located.
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• Desktop systems that deliver HD video collaboration to the personal workspace, including to PCs and laptops.
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• Award-winning Real Presence Mobile, which extends video collaboration beyond the office to leading Apple and Android smartphones and tablets.
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• Innovative video and UC solutions such as Polycom® EagleEye Director, the most intelligent UC camera , which delivers breakthrough HD experiences by automatically zooming in on the active speaker in the room as they talk or walk; and Polycom® UC Board™, which transforms ordinary surfaces into virtual whiteboards.
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These solutions are powered by the Polycom RealPresence Platform, the most comprehensive and interoperable infrastructure for universal video collaboration. The RealPresence Platform provides the robust provisioning, management, scalability, reliability, flexibility and security required both for video enterprises and their private video clouds serving thousands of users, as well as for Video-as-a-Service (VaaS) delivered from the cloud potentially to tens of millions. Because of Polycom's focus on interoperability, the RealPresence Platform works with hundreds of UC and business apps, transforming islands of employees and fragmented communications systems into a seamless video enterprise where enterprise-grade video is easily and securely available to all authorised personnel whether they're mobile, remote, or on-site. Polycom recently announced a rich new suite of open APIs for developers, partners and service providers to integrate business apps such as billing, scheduling, directory, management and monitoring with the Platform, extending the value of RealPresence video solutions to new industries, new use cases and new users.

About Polycom

Polycom is the global leader in open standards-based unified communications (UC) solutions for telepresence, video, and voice powered by the Polycom RealPresence Platform. The RealPresence Platform interoperates with the broadest range of business, mobile, and social applications and devices. More than 400,000 organisations trust Polycom solutions to collaborate and meet face-to-face from any location for more productive and effective engagement with colleagues, partners, customers, specialists and prospects. Polycom, together with its broad partner ecosystem, provides customers with the best total cost of ownership, interoperability, scalability, and security for video collaboration – whether on-premises, hosted, or cloud-delivered. Visit www.polycom.asia or connect with Polycom on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

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