Polycom Puts Conferencing on the Desktop

New products are designed to bring business-quality tools to individual users

by Jack McCarthy

Conferencing and collaboration equipment provider Polycom this week announced a series of offerings designed to bring business-quality conferencing features to personal desktops. The products follow up on a collaborative agreement struck with Microsoft earlier this year to develop rich media services.

The new products include WebOffice 7.0 desktop portal; PVX video conferencing software; SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) support on Polycom's MGC (Multipoint Gateway Controller) platform; and ReadiManager LX100 integrated management and scheduling appliance for video conferencing.

"We are seeing two major trends around rich media collaboration. There is integration between the different collaboration elements into a single user experience, such as using Windows Messenger as a way to launch voice, video, and Web conferencing," says Mark Roberts, vice president of product development for Polycom. "The other area is around enhanced desktop communications with new applications like Polycom PVX, which delivers high-end conferencing and collaboration functionality directly from a PC."

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IVCi Awarded Inc. 500 Ranking for Fourth Consecutive Year

Inc. 500, the nationally recognized list of the fastest growing private companies in America, ranked IVCi at #327 for 2004 with a five-year sales growth from 1999 to 2003 of 200%.

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The Collaboration Revolution

By Chris Böttger

Remember those bulky, expensive video conferencing systems you would see in well-equipped conference rooms not too long ago? You know, the ones the office manager never allowed you to touch? Every now and then, you were invited to sit in on a "video meeting" and you would curiously await the 'pixely' face on the screen. By all accounts, the one-time fuzzy, unreliable and inaccessible technology known as collaborative technologies are making a more pronounced and permanent impression on organizations of all sizes.

The TCI Group (http://www.tcioptics.com), a New York City-based supplier of custom optical components, is a small company that recently joined the collaboration bandwagon. They were in search of a collaboration solution in order to reduce travel to their manufacturing plant in the Czech Republic. When they contracted IVCi, (http://www.ivci.com), an established conferencing integrator, for the implementation of a modest video conferencing system, within two weeks the New York group was having face-to-face meetings with the Czech-based team. The installation was a complete success and TCI recovered their investment in the system within a few months of usage. President G. Rausnitz was so pleased with the installation that he purchased a video conferencing system for his own Long Island, NY home so that he could participate in the meetings without having to drive into his office at 2 A.M. (8 A.M. Czech time). The company has seen a significant increase in usage and a substantial reduction in travel to the European office, and as they grow, they expect this increase in usage to continue.

The appeal of collaborative capability is not new. Collaboration technologies like web and video conferencing have been around for some time, the latter for more than a decade. The fact is that face-to-face meetings are vital to the success of all business relationships and work-related projects. However, collaborating in today's fast-paced, ever-connected world demands that we be at all places at once. The only way to maintain this level of communication without ringing up hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel costs and losing hundreds of valuable hours in productivity every year is by utilizing incorporating conferencing technologies into the mix.

Video conferencing, for its part, has redefined the 'Face-to-Face' meeting. Over the course of three years, Wainhouse Research (http://www.wainhouse.com), an independent market research firm covering the rich media conferencing and communications fields, conducted a detailed study into the incorporation of collaborative technologies into the work environment. The data reveals that people are increasing their reliance on these technologies and this demand is coming from various industries, including legal, government, education, and manufacturing, among others.

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Size Matters

Conferencing Vendors Tailor Solutions for SMBs

by Tara Seals

Conferencing has been a popular and necessary service for large businesses and enterprises for years. Meanwhile, small and medium businesses have suffered from a lack of offers that fit their needs. Most SMBs don't need a fully integrated system with unified messaging, morphing Web presentation Windows and Webcast capability, and they definitely don't need a room-based video conferencing system. A simple Web or video conferencing offer would be useful, however.

“Small to medium-sized companies are rapidly adopting conferencing across all aspects of their businesses, increasingly using conferencing as a way to manage travel expenses. They're realizing that conferencing is a powerful tool that is actually very affordable and ultimately scalable,” says Chuck Mancini, president and CEO of ECI Conference Call Services LLC, which has a wholesale program.

Video is a particularly pent-up market. “Until recently, the video conferencing industry focused primarily on the enterprise market,” says Ira Weinstein, a senior analyst at Wainhouse Research. “Innovative and cost-effective solutions... will play a key role in the growth of the conferencing and collaboration industry.”

Glowpoint Inc., an IP-based video communications service provider, has expanded its “All You Can See” unlimited video calling plans to meet the needs of smaller businesses, including telecommuters, home offices and corporate satellite offices. It is part of GlowPoint's new Individual Video Access service class (IVA), which uses the H.264 video transport protocol to improve call quality at lower bandwidth. IVA costs about $299 per month.

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