CIOIN

In an interview with CIO.IN, Andrew M. Miller, President & CEO of Polycom underscores the initiatives that Polycom has undertaken to avoid the conventional vendor lock-in at organizations and improve interoperability in communications and collaboration platform at various levels. 

CIO: Organizations are circumspect with respect to collaboration technology for fear of a vendor lock in. What is Polycom doing to avoid vendor lock-in and have more interoperability?

Andrew Miller: We believe in open standards and being interoperable with the existing enterprise software or communications platform. Unlike email, or local communications, the collaboration industry has different vendors with different proprietary protocols. This is bad for the industry, because enterprises have mixed environments and their supply chain or vendors do not have the same technology that they use. So, one of the issues in the industry was the lack of open standards.

As a first step we took the Cisco telepresence software called TIP and embedded it in our infrastructure to solve the problem around inter operability. Another option was to join with Microsoft, IBM and HP through the UCIF – Unified Communications Inter operability Forum. But the reality is that such a forum will still take time to mature. So by taking the Cisco software and incorporating it in our technology, Polycom and Cisco are now hundred percent inter operable.

The second step is to be interoperable with what we think are the seven key partners in the industry. So, we have chosen to be natively interoperable with Microsoft, HP, IBM, Juniper Networks, Avaya, Siemens, Broadsoft and McAfee. We have been working with Microsoft and have developed video to provide high definition video conferencing on PC.

CIO: Since mobility is the new wave being experienced by the Indian enterprises, how do you see that being addressed as a part of this collaboration stack?

A.M.:We believe that mobility is one of the next game changers in the Unified Collaboration technology domain.  For example, we recently announced a partnership with Samsung for their Galaxy tablet. We have also announced a similar partnership with Motorola for their Xoom tablets, and there will be announcements in the next few weeks around Apple, RIM, and Nokia.

 We are taking our telepresence software and porting that on the tablet as a native integration. So when you buy a Samsung galaxy tablet you will actually have a Polycom branded icon on the tablet and that is meant to be able to provide enterprise –class mobile video.

 We think that if you could take what the board room has experienced in telepresence, and bring that out to a mobile device, that will expand the opportunity in the consumer market, the SME market, and the mobile market in general. The clear challenge is the opportunity with 4G and LTE, in terms of spectrum availability in different countries. But the opportunity to be mobile, and to be open, is something that we are very focused on and would love to address more of that.

CIO: From your strategy of collaboration and integration with Cisco and with Samsung galaxy tab, you seem to be going with a piecemeal approach. Is it possible to take the collaboration layer, and open the APIs to the world, and let them integrate into Polycom?

A.M.:That is exactly where we are headed.  If you look at API, the SVC technology that we licensed to Microsoft, we are going to open up the opportunity to others as well, just like we worked on the opportunity to port our telepresence technology to open platforms.I think the first step is that we make sure that we are on open standard with Cisco.

The second step is that we develop a technology, like SVC that can be an app to either a desktop or a mobile platform. And open that to anybody who wants to deploy on any type of device. We are working right now with major television monitor manufacturers so that with embedded cameras on set top boxes, on TV sets, on smart phones, on mobile pads etc. we can bring this technology to the consumer marketplace. So the API mentality is exactly what we are going to cater to. You haven’t heard a lot about it because the technology was first licensed to Microsoft, and that was dedicated to Link technology, now we are developing the same technology for other vendors, to deploy it. So apps, is the direction we are headed.

CIO: India is still not into 3G in a manner we would have liked. So do you have any bandwidth optimization technology that makes use of the existing phones with twin cameras?

A.M.: We have developed the HP (high profile) 64 protocol. It has been validated by third parties, that the Polycom product requires 38 -50 percent less bandwidth. Our aim is to provide the lowest total cost of ownership to our customers and 38-50 percent is a big cost savings, from a  bandwidth perspective. For a company with around 3000 persons, this equates to about $2.7 to 2.8 Million in savings.So if you look at smart phone and pad technology, we are using the same HP64 compression algorithms in the pad technology. The challenge is just dependent upon whether it is 2G, or 3G or 4G, LTE network. The other challenge on smart phones is battery life, and quality of cameras.

CIO: Is there any initiative for social collaboration, similar to enterprise collaboration?

A.M.: In terms of about social media interoperability, for example, we are in talks with Facebook where you can launch a video call using our technology. In terms of software as a service, the next two big areas of opportunity are mobility and cloud around SaaS.

 From a company example, 12 percent of our revenues come from service providers, and that’s from a channel perspective. We are focused as a company on developing technologies to sell to the service provider that will enable them to provide a hosted SaaS type model.

 Collaboration or SaaS type models are being deployed by Verizon, At&T, China Unicom, BT, Telstra, and these are the cloud service collaborative technologies. The challenges to this are the following questions- what’s the right way to go about it? What are the right costs in terms of per month usage , number of end points? So there is still a lot of business model work that needs to be done, but that SaaS type model is here, and its right up there in terms of the two issues that we are trying to address in the marketplace.

CIO: Do you see telemedicine using your technology significantly?

A.M.: From a collaborative communication perspective the industry is founded on telemedicine and distant education. Our two largest verticals, in terms of revenue, are tele-health and education. Tele-health has now been divided into multiple aspects, tele- psychiatry, tele-stroke, clearly this issue of people going overseas for less expensive or innovative surgery applications, going back home and follow up is clearly an application.

 So being able to use the video technology, to diagnose a stroke victim, and have a neurologist prescribe a medication, is a perspective on how video can help for tele-health . In our offices we have a medical card, we actually show demonstrations of how to use medical applications with teleconferencing and video conferencing. So, it’s a very important vertical market, from a selfish capitalist perspective, but also from a selfless perspective on how to make the world a better place. And these applications are perfect for that.