All For One

	All For One Polycom unifies the single-box videoconferencing experience By David English

	If you haven’t followed the evolution of Polycom and videoconferencing in the past few years, you may be surprised by all the changes. There has been massive consolidation in the industry. “Basically we’re down to two major vendors: Polycom (www.polycom.com) and Tandberg (www.tandberg.com),” says Lou Latham, an analyst with the Gartner research firm, based in Stamford, Connecticut. “Tandberg is the Mercedes, with a high level of engineering. Polycom is taking more of the General Motors approach, with a very broad scope of functionality.” Tandberg’s products tend to be high-end, while Polycom’s products run the gamut from low- to high-end. Much of the industry’s consolidation is a result of Polycom’s acquisitions over the past five years. These include ViaVideo (video communications) in 1998; Accord Networks (network systems), Circa Communications (IP telephony), PictureTel (video collaboration) and ASPI Digital (installed-room voice) in 2001; MeetU (Web collaboration) in 2002; and VCAS (video scheduling and management) in 2003. If you look at the acquisitions, you can see the company’s underlying strategy: to tie together all the different forms of electronic conferencing into a single box. [an error occurred while processing this directive] Unified Fields To a skeptic, this strategy might appear to be public-relations hype. Is it really possible to integrate audio conferencing, Web-based collaboration, videoconferencing and Web-based streaming into a single product? Polycom made a series of product announcements in February that indicate its acquisition strategy is about to pay off. The key to Polycom’s announcements is what the company calls the “unified conferencing experience.” Currently, you have to decide beforehand whether an electronic conference will be audio-based, Web-based or video-based. You can’t easily switch on the fly, in part because you need different kinds of equipment for each type of conference. Ned Semonite, Polycom’s vice president of product development, says, “On the technology side, we now have a line of products that fit inside the infrastructure that you can use to run audio or video conferences. And those can marry up nicely with Web collaboration servers.” Because you don’t need different pieces of equipment, the people managing the devices don’t have to worry about which network lines the various calls come in on. “They can come in on any type of network and be connected together,” he says. On the user side, the system appears seamless. “All you need to know is the number to call,” says Semonite. “The infrastructure device delivers you to the services you’re capable of receiving. If you come in on a phone, then you’ll just get audio. If you come in on a videoconferencing system, then you’ll hear everybody in the call, and for those people who are connected over video, they’ll see each other.” In the past, you could mix audio- and video-conference participants, but you had to set up everything beforehand. “Now it’s just one set of equipment and one set of people to manage the equipment,” says Semonite. With this new unified approach, a single device eliminates the need to pre-configure a conference. The system automatically “recognizes anyone who comes into the phone number with the password, and puts them into the call,” explains Semonite. “If another person comes in, even though the system isn’t counting on someone else arriving, they’ll be added to the call.” As you might imagine, a device that can do all this, and handle multiple conferences simultaneously, would have to be a sophisticated piece of equipment. Yet according to Semonite, it’s no more expensive than the technology that is available today that do audio and video conferencing. Polycom recently announced a new low-end model in the unified conferencing product line, the MGC-25, with prices starting at $26,000. In addition to being able to combine audio and video conferencing, it lets you instantly add audio conferencing to a Web conference through its integration with Polycom’s WebOffice software. There’s still a missing piece from the unified conferencing picture, and it involves the limitations of trying to connect people through a Web site rather than through a company’s phone lines. While you can use WebOffice to add audio to a Web conference, you can’t yet use the Web-based interface to add video. “Going forward, we’ll have that same type of user interface where you’ll be able to add people on video,” says Semonite. Source: AVVMMP 1 2 Next