Polycom Introduces New Adoption Services Aimed at Making Video Collaboration Ubiquitous in Corporate Work Environments

London, UK (PRWEB UK) 6 September 2012

Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM), the global leader in open standards-based unified communications, today unveiled Polycom Adoption Services, four new services designed to help enterprises rapidly accelerate user adoption and the returns on their investments of Polycom® RealPresence® video solutions, whether on the go or in a home office, work office, conference room, or immersive telepresence theatre.

Polycom Adoption Services are built around an innovative adoption methodology developed by Polycom. The services incorporate best practices that have been proven to broaden adoption of Polycom® RealPresence® video collaboration solutions among customers, partners and employees.

For organisations looking to accelerate their rate of return from any enterprise deployment, including video collaboration solutions, widespread user adoption is essential. Surveys have found that user adoption is far and away the most important factor for realising value from an investment in any enterprise solution.1

Once video collaboration becomes part of a company’s daily workflow, bottom-line benefits, such as increased productivity and reduced travel and op-ex, add up quickly. In fact, customers report that Polycom video collaboration saves them an average of 24 per cent in sales-related costs and 30 per cent in travel costs, while accelerating time-to-market an average of 24 per cent.2 These and other benefits typically pay for a Polycom solution within a year or less. At the same time, users themselves quickly discover that embracing video collaboration saves them time, reduces their business travel, enables them to communicate more effectively and make more informed decisions, and allows them to achieve better work-life balance by reducing time spent away from home.

Enabling a Cultural Shift by Focusing on the User Experience
Polycom Adoption Services address essential aspects of adoption to deliver an optimal user experience from the first moments of planning through implementation and widespread use. The new adoption services are:

• Adoption Consulting. To establish a framework for adoption, Polycom consultants

conduct surveys and interviews to assess business needs, objectives, and the technology environment, as well as individual user needs to help create the solution design that enables a simple and reliable user experience that is essential for successful adoption. They also work with customers to produce an action plan and to identify a tool for measuring adoption over time.

• Adoption Portal. This service offers a scalable, cost-effective, and user-friendly alternative to expensive and unwieldy on-site training. Adoption Portal is a turnkey package for creating a customised online user resource that features an array of video tutorials, how-tos, FAQs, and other content illustrating how users can make video collaboration part of their everyday workflow.
• Adoption Campaign. Enterprises can accelerate adoption by engaging users with a promotional campaign that reinforces the value and advantages of video collaboration. Polycom provides customisable banners, posters, videos and email communications – all echoing a “Go Video” theme while directing users to the company’s video portal.
• RealPresence Analytics. This cloud-based service is built around an easy-to-use reporting solution that helps accurately gauge adoption through in-depth measurement and analysis. Easily customised reports track adoption across several metrics, and advanced analytics help inform on-going planning and resource allocation plans by enabling customers to identify usage patterns, service quality and cost trends.

A Holistic Approach to Adoption Across the Enterprise
The four new services augment Polycom’s existing technology optimisation services, which help customers ensure that their network, infrastructure and video environments are capable of meeting the needs of users. By engaging expert support from Polycom or one of its partners, customers can achieve a 360-degree approach to adoption across the enterprise. Polycom’s Global Services organisation also offers a full range of services to maximise customers’ ROI throughout the product lifecycle, from design and deployment to maintenance, management (including managing integration with Microsoft Lync, IBM Sametime and other UC platforms), and optimisation of existing solutions.

“Today, Polycom sets a new standard by introducing new services specifically devoted to helping customers create a culture of collaboration across their enterprise and, in doing so, accelerate user adoption and their ROI from Polycom RealPresence solutions,” said Sudhakar Ramakrishna, Polycom’s president of products and services. “Polycom Adoption Services, and the methodology on which they are based, focus on the user experience from the earliest planning phase through implementation and beyond.”

Polycom RealPresence video solutions – which range from mobile apps and desktop software to group video systems and immersive theatres – are powered by the Polycom RealPresence Platform. The RealPresence Platform – the most comprehensive and interoperable UC infrastructure for universal video collaboration – provides robust provisioning, management, scalability, reliability, flexibility, and security. Because of Polycom's focus on interoperability, the RealPresence Platform transforms islands of fragmented communications systems into a seamless culture of collaboration, with enterprise-grade video easily and securely accessible to all authorised personnel whether they’re mobile, remote, or on-site.

Availability
Polycom Adoption Services are available today. For more information, visit http://www.polycom.com/services.

About Polycom Polycom is the global leader in open standards-based unified communications (UC) solutions for voice and video collaboration, trusted by more than 415,000 customers around the world. Polycom solutions are powered by the Polycom® RealPresence® Platform, comprehensive software infrastructure and rich APIs that interoperate with the broadest set of communication, business, mobile and cloud applications and devices to deliver secure face-to-face video collaboration in any environment. Polycom and its ecosystem of over 7,000 partners provide truly unified communications solutions that deliver the best user experience, highest multi-vendor interoperability, and lowest TCO. Visit http://www.polycom.co.uk or connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to learn how we’re pushing the greatness of human collaboration forward.

© 2012 Polycom, Inc. All rights reserved. POLYCOM®, the Polycom logo, and the names and marks associated with Polycom’s products are trademarks and/or service marks of Polycom, Inc. and are registered and/or common law marks in the United States and various other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

1: “Enterprise Software: Focus on User Adoption, Not Features,” Jason Rothbart, Read Write Web, Oct. 17, 2008, accessed Jan. 26, 2012 at http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/focus_on_user_adoption_not_software_features.php
2: “Validating ROI in Enterprise and SMB,” Polycom summary of Wainhouse Research ROI Survey: “Benchmarking the Benefits of Videoconferencing Deployments,” 2009, accessed Jan, 26, 2012 at http://www.polycom.com/global/documents/products/resources/utilization/validating-roi-in-enterprise-and-smb.pdf

Contacts
Sarah Brambley/Lisa Perry
EMEA Communications, Polycom
Sarah.brambley (at) polycom (dot) com
Lisa.perry (at) polycom (dot) com