Sudhakar Ramakrishna is the EVP & GM-Unified Communications Solutions and Chief Development Officer at Polycom (NASDAQ:PLCM), a leading provider of standards-based unified communications (UC) solutions for telepresence, video, and voice. He joined Polycom in 2010 and is responsible for defining and delivering best in class unified communication products and solutions and driving revenue growth and profitability.

Before Polycom, Ramakrishna was Corporate VP and GM for Wireless Broadband Access Solutions and Software Operations at Motorola where he was instrumental in scaling the 4G (WiMAX and LTE) and Software business, and led large multi-function teams of more than 2300 employees, and businesses across the globe. Previously, he held senior management roles at Stoke Networks, 3Com, U.S. Robotics and other companies.

Key trends driving the industry and the company

One of the key goals at Polycom is to make video collaboration ubiquitous. How can you make it much more pervasive, much more easy to use and cost effective so that the adoption grows dramatically? One way of doing it is to cloud enable the application and deliver it to the service providers. Cloud is going to be a major driver in the coming years and keeping this in view we have rolled out the first phase of implementation of our cloud strategy early this year — enable service providers to offer cloud-delivered, Video-as-a-Service (VaaS) solutions to its customers. Polycom® RealPresence™ Cloud is the first in this family of solutions. RealPresence Cloud solutions are designed specifically for service providers to equip them with the carrier-grade infrastructure, endpoints, and services they need to offer businesses of all sizes subscription-based solutions for video collaboration. The new offering for service providers is designed to accelerate the penetration and adoption of Polycom video collaboration solutions among SMBs (small to medium sized businesses) and enterprises who want either a hybrid solution of both premises-based video collaboration solutions and video on demand, or a pure VaaS solution.

Polycom RealPresence Cloud solutions compress the time-to-market and time-to-revenue for service providers to deliver VaaS solutions. Powered by the Polycom RealPresence Platform, a complete and interoperable solution for universal video collaboration, RealPresence Cloud provides the carrier-grade scalability, reliability, availability, and security required for service providers to offer VaaS to SMBs and enterprises. RealPresence Cloud solutions encompass a fully managed multipoint video service that supports a multitude of connectivity options between standards-based room, mobile, PC, and Web-based endpoints, as well as Microsoft Lync 2010, IBM Sametime, and endpoints supporting the non-standard TIP protocol. Service providers can leverage Polycom RealPresence Cloud solutions to offer their customers a true business-to-business VaaS solution without having to fully integrate and support the core infrastructure on-premises. This solution leverages the Polycom RealPresence Network (formerly the Halo/HVEN network acquired from HP in 2011) to allow service providers to fast-track their capability to deliver video from the cloud.