Business15.01.2010

Conferencing platform

Polycom to enrich IBM Lotus Sametime 8.5 with standards-based telepresence, video and voice collaboration through highly scalable, redundant conferencing platform

In conjunction with IBM Lotusphere taking place next week in Orlando, Fla., Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM), the global leader in telepresence, video and voice communication solutions, today announced an expansion of its integrated voice and visual communication solutions for customers deploying IBM Unified Communication and Collaboration (UC2) environments with support for Lotus Sametime and Lotus Notes. The combined solution is designed to give users “one-click” access to on-demand voice and video collaboration tools from within Lotus software applications that can enhance teamwork, reduce costs, and help accelerate enterprise decision making among colleagues, customers and business partners.

“People are most effective when the communication and collaboration tools they need are instantly available as part of the everyday workflow,” said Dan Engel, regional sales manager of Polycom. “Polycom’s integration with the IBM UC2 environment puts our powerful, productivity enhancing collaboration tools just one-click away within the applications that millions of people use every day to communicate with others. This allows customers to extend the value of their UC investment by adding scalable, standards-based telepresence, video and voice collaboration capabilities that can further enhance efficiency and reduce costs.”

The Polycom solution will allow users to “Click-to-Call” and “Click-to-Conference” telepresence, video, voice and unified (combined voice and video) conferencing from presence-enabled contacts within IBM Lotus Sametime and Lotus Notes. In addition, Lotus Sametime Web conferencing users will be able to launch Instant Meetings with voice and video conferences, or include a voice or video conference as part of scheduled web conference.

The Polycom integrated solution will provide organisations with a scalable, redundant, standards-based infrastructure platform for rich-media conferencing within IBM UC2 environments. The solution will feature integration with the latest release of Sametime Release 8.5, IBM Lotus Sametime Server and IBM Lotus Domino Server, and provide seamless call routing between the Lotus applications and Polycom immersive, room and personal telepresence systems and desktop and conference room video conferencing systems for point-to-point video calls, and the Polycom RMX 2000 and 4000 media conferencing platforms for multi-site voice, video or unified conferences. The standards-based solution allows users to leverage existing investments in visual communication systems for greater ROI and provides a broad ecosystem of nearly two-million standards-based telepresence and video conferencing systems in use today for extended collaboration.

This announcement expands existing integration that Polycom offers with IBM UC2 and complements an agreement between Polycom and IBM Global Technology Services to deliver scalable, security-enriched and highly-available unified communications solutions to enterprise clients around the globe. Polycom is a sponsor and exhibitor at Lotusphere 2010 (booth no. 611) and IBM is a Platinum sponsor at the upcoming Polycom partner conference and sales event taking place at the end of January.

Availability:

Polycom will deliver integration for IBM Sametime 8.5 in 2010, with the first phase planned for availability in Q1 2010.

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