Polycom: A Real Life Experience

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In today's cutthroat competition, enterprises constantly need to increase productivity, reduce costs and save time. Conferencing solutions have constantly helped companies in achieving these objectives, and have kept evolving to make the experience as near to real life as possible. From plain vanilla conferencing to enabling collaborations and other sharing applications, conferencing solutions have come a truly long way in giving the users what they want.

Polycom showcased its RPX 400 series for the first time in London on February 9, 2007. It is another evolution in the conferencing technology, which takes the user experience to an all-together new level. Acoustically tuned environment, life size video conferencing capabilities, near DVD quality and eye-connect techniques makes conferencing a different experience.

"Other than the audio visual features, RPX 400 has low cost of ownership and connects to as many sites as you wish, which is a great benefit for the enterprise users" says Yugal Sharma, country manager India and SAARC, Polycom.

The first Polycom real presence system was set up in 1999 and presently there are 35-40 around the world. In India, AOL and Time warner, 2 in Bangalore and another in Hyderabad, have deployed these solutions.

RPX 400 Series technology INSide

Giant 16'x42" high-resolution screens
Four rear projectors
Four Polycom VSX 8000 codecs with encryption for security
Polycom People+Content� IP
Polycom Vortex Automatic Mic/Matrix Mixer with Phone Hybrid and Power Amp
Four hidden cameras
Pop-up Personal Content displays-PC with wireless keyboard and mouse linked to 15" pop-up LCD monitors at every other seat
Studio-quality lighting
Three embedded microphones
Open-speaker system that eliminates echoes, feedback and cut-off sentences
Integrated Polycom SoundStation VTX 1000� conference phone
Touchscreen environmental controls, e.g. audio levels, muting and call add-in capability
Network and power connections at every seat to accommodate laptops
Ability to project whiteboarding, VHS or DVDs, PowerPoint and spreadsheets

Personal Touch
A class apart from the traditional videoconferencing solutions, RPX 400 series provides high definition video experience without any extra effort by the users. The codecs used allow communication with any H.323 videoconferencing system and expansion to other industry trends for collaborative conferencing. The users are able to seamlessly share content during a video call. Polycom Vortex EF 2280 and sound station VTX 1000 enable revolutionary voice quality and clarity at considerably large distances. Integrated ceiling mics allow superior sound pick up from any seat in the room. Its software allows presenters to show content over an IP network connection during a call, and enables quick and easy knowledge share. Polycom RPX benefits businesses by increasing productivity, giving a personal touch to long distance meetings, increase effectiveness of meetings, enable faster knowledge transfer and management, and reduce the total cost of ownership.

Real presence gives a true feeling of having a presence in the same room and experience of a face-to-face meeting and is only restricted by space availability. The technology applied optimizes the bandwidth usage requiring basic broadband connection, addressing the spectrum woes of the enterprise users. It has immense applicability not only in the traditional conferencing and collaboration segment but also in the field of education and telemedicine as well.

Real presence truly revolutionizes the room-based conferencing and brings in a new trend in the collaborative technologies segment.

Sonia Sharma
sonias@cybermedia.co.in
(The author was hosted in London)