Polycom Extends Unified Communications Capabilities for Outsourcery

By Anuradha Shukla, TMCnet Contributor

Outsourcery has chosen the Polycom UC Intelligent Core infrastructure to deliver a new generation of cloud-based voice and video collaboration services for Microsoft (News - Alert) unified communications (UC) environments.

Polycom will allow Outsourcery to offer its enhanced services to clients via a cloud-based model that aids enterprises to use the most advanced UC capabilities on a per-user, fixed-cost basis.

Best of all, enterprises will not have to invest in new hardware and infrastructure.

"Deriving maximum value from Microsoft UC environments requires the ability to collaborate with anyone, anywhere, and in the way that allows smarter decisions to be made sooner," said Mark Seemann, chief technology officer at Outsourcery. "Only Polycom (News - Alert) offers a reliable, scalable, redundant platform featuring native integration with Microsoft, which is necessary to achieve our vision for truly integrated cloud-based voice and video collaboration within Microsoft UC environments. With Polycom, we're creating a new category in the cloud, and we look forward to driving its evolution together."

After evaluating other vendors in the market, Outsourcery chose Polycom over Cisco (News - Alert) and other providers as it appreciated Polycom's broad, high-quality portfolio of voice and video solutions as well as its proven and unparalleled integration with Microsoft Lync 2010.

Outsourcery also picked Polycom over LifeSize (News - Alert) as its preferred provider of high-definition (HD) room telepresence environments. The company chose Polycom for its

implementation of standards-based H.264 High Profile technology, which reduces the bandwidth requirements for HD video communication by as much as 50 percent while also working with Microsoft Office Communications Server and Lync.

Polycom points out that this claim is proved by independent tests, which proved Polycom telepresence solutions deliver no-compromise HD calls at half the bandwidth of H.264 Baseline calls.

"Outsourcery has long been an innovator in hosted services, and today's announcement shows that this market leader's vision is sharper than ever," said Gary Rider, president of Polycom EMEA. "As more customers engage with this new service, Outsourcery can build out its Polycom UC Intelligent Core to expand its capacity and feature set. And with Outsourcery at the forefront of cloud-based computing, we expect this remarkable company to even influence the capabilities of future Polycom solutions."

Read a related article at TMCnet: “Telepresence (News - Alert) - NEC in Pact with Polycom for Desktop Video Conferencing.”