Polycom’s developers have been very busy lately, based on a slew of product upgrades and announcements coming from the company. Polycom’s latest RealPresence Platform upgrades are designed to improve video collaboration from private, public and hybrid clouds, ensure multi-vendor interoperability, and bring down the cost for enterprises service providers.
The company’s enhancements include a standards-based SVC (Scalable Video Coding), with 3X HD multipoint video call capacity featuring backward- and forward-compatibility — all available through a software update. Polycom also announced RealPresence Collaboration Server 800s as a Virtual Edition, offering a multi-protocol, integrated software MCU that runs on industry-standard servers. It has also extended firewall traversal and security options with the RealPresence Access Director, providing added capacity and supported protocols meant to improved B2B and B2C connectivity.
MORE: Polycom aims browser-based cloud videoconferencing at enterprises, carriers
In related announcement, Polycom’s RealPresence Cloud AXIS Suite, an extension of Polycom RealPresence Platform, now lets customers extend their enterprise-grade video collaboration to users of Skype, Facebook, Google Talk, and business video applications via a browser. The extensions are intended to further enable B2B and B2C videoconferencing.
Commenting in a statement about the announcements, Sudhakar Ramakrishna, president of products and services, Polycom, said, “Polycom is [now] delivering several industry firsts, such as the first open standards-based SVC implementation, which boosts multipoint capacity by 3X and works with other popular standards so that customers don’t need to rip and replace their current investments or buy expensive gateways required by competitive SVC offerings. In addition, Polycom is offering the industry’s first multi-protocol, integrated software MCU, RealPresence Collaboration Server 800s, Virtual Edition, which runs on industry-standard servers for greater flexibility and cost savings.”
Polycom’s SVC support is available through software updates to components of the RealPresence Platform, including RealPresence Collaboration Server 7.8 and 8.1 (RMX), RealPresence Resource Manager 7.1, and RealPresence Virtualization Manager 5.1 (DMA). These software updates also include support for Polycom’s next-generation video endpoints.
