Polycom has enhanced its UC Intelligent Core technology once again, beefing up the platform to support 75,000 devices or up to 25,000 concurrent calls and native integration with Microsoft Lync, putting it squarely in the sights of service providers looking for large-scale UC offerings.

“[The number of devices supported] is pretty significant – it’s more than five times anything else in the competitive field,” said John Antanaitis, vice president of product marketing at Polycom. “In certain environments, it could be significantly more than five times, depending on whether the calls are voice calls or video calls.”

For service providers working with large enterprise customers or geographically dispersed companies, Polycom’s upgraded technology represents an opportunity to service a larger base of customers with a single solution. “Service providers have been telling us they need greater scale, and this is a solution that has true redundancy, resiliency and failover protection,” he said. “Service providers can geographically distribute the platform software and connect and manage and deploy and provision multiple pieces of the network as single unit.”

Plus, the latest version of the UC Intelligent Core features a universal bridge to support a range of standards such as H.323, Cisco System’s TIP, SIP, POTS/ISDN and Microsoft’s RTV.

“We have chosen to operate on a philosophy of standards and openness to maximize opportunities for us and our customers,” Antanaitis said. “Organizations want to collaborate, they want their people to get together and work together more effectively, and the cornerstone of UC has become visual collaboration. Part of the maximization of that value proposition is who you can reach and talk to.”

Polycom also has deepened its relationship with Microsoft to provide native integration with Lync, the next generation of Microsoft Office Communications Server.

“We expect to see continued adoption and enhanced adoption as Lync grows,” Antanaitis said. “There’s no doubt we’ve been a partner of Microsoft for a long time, but 18 months ago that relationship changed – we had a number of contractual agreements to grow the industry and work together, and now people are seeing it wasn’t marketing – it was legitimate indication of the direction we’re heading together.”

The UC Intelligent Core announcement was one of many Polycom announced at Infocomm 2011, happening June 11-17 in Orlando. The company also announced upgrades to its cloud-based Polycom Video Content Management solutions, including the Polycom Accordent Media Management System 4.5 and Accordent Capture Station 5.1, which enables companies to manage and deliver video content via the cloud — technologies Polycom gained in its acquisition of Accordent earlier this year.

“MMS now allows us to take in enhanced interaction with Microsoft Lync, Silverlight, SQL and Sharepoint, and it’s also supported in Azure – an area clearly cloud-based,” he said. “What’s also nice about that is MMS integrates with the Polycom RSS 4000 media streaming station, and when it connects with the RSS 4000 it enhances users’ ability to view and track video on demand.”

Antanaitis also noted the MMS automatically finds and displays live streams or sets them up as upcoming events within the system. “Companies want to reach as many users so if the system knows the RSS is going to capture a meeting or training on a particular date, the MMS will create a place on the portal that displays live streams for folks to access. When something is created as an upcoming event, the system then can notify users that event is taking place,” he said.

Capture Station, meanwhile, now has enhanced support for Expression Coder and Smoothstream to dynamically adjust playback rates and quality based on users’ environments.

Polycom’s moves to expand its UC Intelligent Core and move deeper into the video management space — through the cloud, no less — are indicative of the company’s strategy of “UC Everywhere” and further demonstrates Polycom’s commitment to fulfilling that strategy. Couple these most recent announcements with Polycom’s ongoing policy of supporting on all standards on an open platform — including launching the Open Visual Communication Consortium to provide the stepping stones for an interconnected network — and it’s easy to see why Polycom and its channel partners are finding success.

The updated UC Intelligent Core platform will be available in third quarter 2011, while the MMS and Capture Station offerings are slated to be available at the end of June.

Sign up for The VAR Guy’s Weekly Newsletter, Webcasts and Resource Center. Follow The VAR Guy via RSS, Facebook and Twitter. Follow experts at VARtweet. Read The VAR Guy’s editorial disclosures here.

Read More About This Topic

Share This Post

Leave a Comment

 

Blog-Powered Site By ContentRobot