CIOIN

Polycom, Inc., a global leader in unified communications and a Microsoft Gold certified partner, announced that Outsourcery, a leading U.K. provider of cloud-based solutions, has chosen the Polycom UC Intelligent Core infrastructure to deliver a new generation of cloud-based voice and video collaboration services for Microsoft unified communications (UC) environments.

Enabling UC in the cloud
Outsourcery is turning to Polycom to extend its existing collaboration capabilities to customers of Outsourcery's hosted Microsoft UC solutions. When the Polycom solutions are deployed in December, Outsourcery will begin offering its enhanced services to clients via a cloud-based model that allows enterprises to use the most advanced UC capabilities on a per-user, fixed-cost basis, and without investing in new hardware and infrastructure.

"Deriving maximum value from Microsoft UC environments requires the ability to collaborate with anyone, anywhere, and in the way that allows smarter decisions to be made sooner," said Mark Seemann, chief technology officer at Outsourcery. "Only Polycom offers a reliable, scalable, redundant platform featuring native integration with Microsoft, which is necessary to achieve our vision for truly integrated cloud-based voice and video collaboration within Microsoft UC environments. With Polycom, we're creating a new category in the cloud, and we look forward to driving its evolution together."

Efficient collaboration, anytime, anywhere
Outsourcery chose Polycom over Cisco and other providers because of Polycom's broad, high-quality portfolio of voice and video solutions as well as its proven and unparalleled integration with Microsoft Lync 2010. Leveraging the Polycom UC Intelligent Core, Outsourcery customers can, entirely from within their Microsoft applications, escalate instant messaging chats or voice calls to video conferences. Though these capabilities are used every day by Polycom customers around the world, delivering them via a cloud-based model is new.

Additionally, Outsourcery selected Polycom over LifeSize as its preferred provider of high-definition (HD) room telepresence environments. Key to this selection was Polycom's industry-leading implementation of standards-based H.264 High Profile technology, which reduces the bandwidth requirements for HD video communication by as much as 50 percent while also working with Microsoft Office Communications Server and Lync - a claim substantiated by independent tests, which proved Polycom telepresence solutions deliver no-compromise HD calls at half the bandwidth of H.264 Baseline calls.

Polycom also enables Outsourcery to scale point-to-point calls into large, multi-point conferences and to converge any type of video and voice call (GSM, traditional landline, voice-over-IP, etc.) into one conference - another unique capability that opens new possibilities for collaboration while adding value to every UC endpoint.

"Outsourcery has long been an innovator in hosted services, and today's announcement shows that this market leader's vision is sharper than ever," said Gary Rider, president of Polycom EMEA. "As more customers engage with this new service, Outsourcery can build out its Polycom UC Intelligent Core to expand its capacity and feature set. And with Outsourcery at the forefront of cloud-based computing, we expect this remarkable company to even influence the capabilities of future Polycom solutions."