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April - 2014 - issue > View Point
Driving Innovations through Collaborations
A.E.Natarajan
EVP-World Wide Engineering-Polycom
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
Headquartered in California, Polycom (NASDAQ:PLCM) offers Open standards based unified communications, HD video and voice conferencing solutions. The company has a market cap of $1.80 billion.

Ever since innovations have swept across the industry, integration has become the core need in the IT environment. Enterprises today rely on software which can best fit their business models. At Polycom, in keeping with the requirement for integration, we have unveiled the capability to integrate video collaboration technology into IBM care manager. The collaboration of our RealPresence video and voice collaboration products with the already implied platforms like IBM has enabled the practitioners in the health care sector to extend their care to the patients irrespective of time and location. This has been viewed as a huge gain to manage work-life in a better way and also deliver better patient outcomes on course in the health care industry. As technology helps in increased efficiency and work productivity, there is a potential for the same in the future in terms of integration, be it workflows or any service platforms.

Addressing Industrial Intricacies

The need is increasing for a perfect amalgamation of communication and collaboration into the normal workflows of an organization. People are using various tools in the same environment to collaborate, both within the company and outside the enterprise. For example, if HR personnel are using a recruitment technology software application, they often need to exit the HR-specific application in order to communicate with the candidate, whether by calling on the phone or perhaps initiating a videoconference. However, integration of video collaboration technology into workflow applications through API development is advancing and evolving, and there is a lot of momentum in this space. Polycom's integration services provide scalable, interoperable standards based infrastructure platform enabling media rich conferencing.

Converting Tasks as Innovations

One of the highest means to innovate is to drive one within. I feel it as a challenge that all business leaders should take upon, as sometimes it may lead to investments within the company to start with. It is also equally important for the leader to identify the tech prodigy and conceptualize it to take forward. In the course of driving innovation within, we introduced Virtual Meeting Room (VMR), a means of video meeting among our team members, and encouraged its increased usage at different levels. This provided a newer dimension among the workers on discovering distinct methods for usage and hence adding value to the product in terms of flexibility. Today, Polycom's employees on an average conduct more than 2,500 video conferences a day. The customer influence has been the fruitful part of the whole initiation as we saw a 20 percent increase in the usage of VMRs for video adoption. A recent survey conducted by Wainhouse, a market research firm and Polycom, reveals thatover 5,000 enterprises falling into the video end-user category reaped top benefits of adapting to video collaboration resulting in higher productivity and increased efficiency.

Delivering Accordingly

More initiations explore more challenges. As a person shouldering the product's on-goings, the challenges one faces as a CEO or a CIO is a universal one. As CIOs drive product innovations, they are also mindful of its landscape in terms of its market value for that time. What CEOs need now is a product that exhibits agility and involves robust attributes operating at lower costs. With natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy impacting businesses, leaders at top levels are searching for methods to combat disasters and hence mitigate their impact upon businesses. This appears to be a far reach from prediction, analysis to planning So, this is where Polycom serves the need, as we connect the main resource in people at various technological levels providing-receiving information and implementing it as a service to quickly serve the purpose. Our solutions have thus resulted in fast paced collaborations around the world bringing invaluable value addition through efficiency and gaining productivity and all these without the pain of adding to one's travel expenses. So, the bottom-line, I see it is to redefine the challenges and get going with what serves in an optimal productive way.

Listener's Act

At Polycom, the ability of our team to adhere to the methods and technology that model as a timely innovative product is through adaptability. To be flexible to change is by providing a good ear to the ever converging culture which has yielded innovations at most times. This is on-course at Polycom as a global company involving customers of different needs and with different background. We strive to have a better understanding of them and put our brain to work as to how to address their problems. It is well known that the genesis of innovation has always been brought through need. So, to remain on an act of continual improvements, we are determined to lend ear to our team members and our customers of their wants, and transforming, collaborating to inventive actions.

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