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Unified communications provider Polycom Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM) detailed its strategy to enable service providers to offer cloud-delivered, video as a service solutions to its customers. The company also unveiled RealPresence Cloud, a wholesale offering designed to enable service providers to bring to market VaaS offerings.
RealPresence Cloud solutions are designed for service providers to equip them with the infrastructure, endpoints and services they need to offer businesses subscription-based solutions for video collaboration.
The offering for service providers is designed to accelerate the penetration and adoption of Polycom video collaboration solutions among small and midsize businesses (SMBs) and enterprises that want either a hybrid solution of both premises-based video collaboration solutions and video on demand, or a pure VaaS solution. The solution leverages the RealPresence Network, formerly the Halo/HVEN network acquired from HP in 2011.
Powered by the Polycom RealPresence platform, RealPresence Cloud solutions encompass a managed multipoint video service that supports a multitude of connectivity options between standards-based room, mobile, PC and Web-based endpoints, as well as Microsoft Lync 2010, IBM Sametime and endpoints supporting the nonstandard Telepresence Interoperatiblity Protocol (TIP). Service providers can leverage RealPresence Cloud solutions to offer their customers a VaaS solution without having to fully integrate and support the core infrastructure on-premises.
Several carriers around the world are currently using the RealPresence Platform as the enabler for VaaS solutions. For example, China Unicom has created a video cloud, powered by the RealPresence Platform, which enables the delivery of VaaS to more than 10,000 business and government organizations throughout China. China Unicom’s video cloud interconnects approximately 100,000 endpoints from 10 vendors. Another example, Airtel, a service provider in India, is also using the RealPresence Platform to deliver VaaS solutions to SMBs and enterprises throughout India.
Wainhouse Research forecasts that the five-year compound annual growth rate for the hosted and managed UC market worldwide will be 30.7 percent, with revenue of approximately $5 billion in 2015.
Polycom’s cloud strategy builds on the company’s goal to make video collaboration ubiquitous and is a key tenet of Polycom’s recently announced software strategy.
“As the demand for video collaboration continues to grow, cloud-delivered video offerings will be a key contributor to this growth. Many SMBs and enterprises will find video as a service offerings attractive due to their flexibility, scalability and cost savings,” said Rich Costello, IDC senior research analyst. “Polycom’s cloud strategy is compelling, as it provides an accelerated path to market for cloud-delivered video, and gives service providers the robust infrastructure, scalability and interoperability needed to deploy wide-scale video clouds and deliver compelling VaaS solutions to customers.”
The RealPresence platform provides an open standards-based foundation for integrating UC applications and infrastructure in enterprise environments-from video endpoints to mobile devices to UC infrastructure from Microsoft, IBM, BroadSoft, Juniper, and Siemens. In the interest of driving video ubiquity, the RealPresence Platform also interoperates with some proprietary systems, such as Cisco Telepresence products that use the TIP. In addition, the RealPresence platform, which powers the company’s cloud solutions, supports up to 75,000 device registrations and 25,000 concurrent sessions.
In June 2011, Polycom partnered with leading global telecommunications solution and service providers from around the world to unleash broader visual communications adoption by enabling interoperability and global business-to-business connectivity for telepresence and video conferencing. Polycom is a founding member of the Open Visual Communications Consortium (OVCC), which was incorporated in August.