Polycom Launches New Cloud Services
Company’s new cloud-based tool for enterprise customers brings insights and control of rapidly transforming meeting room technology
Polycom unveiled its unified cloud solutions strategy, Polycom Cloud Services, and released Polycom Device Management Services (PDMS). This service provides new capabilities to enterprise customers to manage and measure their telephony devices. As a market leader with over 15 million desktop and conference phones, Polycom’s footprint in enterprises and service providers alike will be complemented by the new cloud service’s ability to streamline and simplify management, provisioning, and updating.
Polycom also announced it will continue to roll out new cloud solutions for enterprise customers and add services for solution providers in the coming months. These new services simplify the audio device lifecycle management process by using the cloud to bring data and analytics to manage, monitor, and measure the growing complexity of audio devices in organisations.
“Employees are solving problems together more than ever before by connecting from meeting spaces of all sizes from all over the world. As meeting technology innovation accelerates, so does the complexity,” said Mary McDowell, CEO of Polycom. “Polycom Cloud Services offer customers unique, informative, and actionable data that empowers IT professionals to understand the value of their meeting rooms and make smart technology decisions that create exciting, productive, and fun meeting experiences for their employees.”
The new Polycom Cloud Services for enterprise customers and service providers are:
For Enterprise Customers
Available now for enterprise customers, PDMS for Enterprise enables IT pros to simply and seamlessly manage all their Polycom audio devices, including desk phones and conference room phones, from a single cloud portal. The PDMS-E portal enables enterprises to provision, update, and secure audio devices whether they have five or 50,000 conference and desk phones.
Polycom’s RealConnect interoperability solution will become part of Polycom’s Cloud Services in Q3 of this year. The RealConnect cloud service creates an interoperability layer that runs audio services, specifically Microsoft Skype for Business, in a customer’s current environments using Polycom or other hardware. The RealConnect cloud service brings Polycom’s ecosystem strategy to the cloud so customers have choice and flexibility.
For Service Providers
Service Providers have distinct needs from those of enterprise customers, so Polycom will be releasing a version of PDMS in Q3 of 2018 specifically for these customers that will allow them to incorporate Polycom audio device management and analytics into their customer portal experience. Service Providers will benefit from improved uptime and the ability to anticipate and mitigate customer issues, aggregate critical analytical data, and customise devices to meet customer needs.
Polycom will release an API in Q3 so Service Providers can customise what services and analytics they need for each customer. These APIs will turn PDMS into a platform that empowers service providers immediately and opens the door to future innovation and exciting development opportunities as endpoints like Polycom Trio get even smarter in the future.
Polycom Cloud Services focus on audio devices and solutions today, but the company anticipates adding support to enterprise customers for video conference devices by end of 2018. Expanding management capabilities to video endpoints devices is critical as audio and video conferencing devices continue to converge in a single meeting room experience.
Earlier this year, the company demonstrated natural language processing running on its leading audio and video conferencing systems, Polycom Trio and Group Series. Polycom will continue to add innovations that improve the meeting room experience for every type of user.
“Simplifying human to human connections is in Polycom’s DNA, so leveraging the cloud to enhance how our customers manage, measure, and use their voice, video, and content systems makes complete sense,” said Tarun Loomba, EVP, Global Solutions at Polycom. “Polycom Cloud Services streamline our ability to bring simpler and better experiences to our customers whose collaboration needs are growing every single day.”