Kathea accelerates mass adoption of video collaboration with breakthrough Polycom solutions

Kathea, a distributor of video communications solutions, has announced the release of several breakthrough solutions from Polycom that are designed to transform the industry, accelerate mass adoption of video collaboration, and fuel new growth opportunities for the company in both existing and new markets.

These solutions are the culmination of more than two years of research and development efforts focused on augmenting Polycom’s portfolio and removing the impediments to video adoption. Polycom aims to make video collaboration easier to use and manage, universally accessible, more scalable at a lower cost, more affordable for small to medium-size enterprises, more interoperable, and more sleek and powerful for business users on their desktop.

“We believe this launch of next-generation video solutions will set a new industry standard for best user experience for both end users and IT administrators, and will also provide a seamless and extensible path for customers to fully video-enable their organisations. We also believe these new solutions will significantly expand our addressable market opportunity and accelerate growth for Polycom and our partners, within our installed base, and from new market opportunities within small-to-medium enterprises, and through new OEM distribution models,” says Andy Miller, CEO, Polycom.

As part of this launch, Polycom has announced an entire portfolio of next-generation products and solutions – fully backward- and forward-compatible – that extend the delivery of video collaboration to more endpoints, more environments and more people.

Polycom’s innovative new portfolio of offerings includes:

•  Polycom RealPresence CloudAXIS Suite – an extension to the RealPresence Platform that offers universal access to enterprise-grade video collaboration using Skype, Facebook, Google Talk, and other business video applications.
•  Polycom User Experience (UX) – the industry’s best video collaboration experience with more than 20 new user innovations and features designed to drive a superior experience and ease of use to increase adoption and minimise IT management and support.
•  Polycom RealPresence Group Series (300, 500 and 700) – the next-generation HD video collaboration systems for both rooms and budgets of all sizes, with updated Polycom RealPresence Desktop 2.0 software for PCs and laptops and Polycom RealPresence Mobile 2.0 for tablets and smartphones to extend video beyond conference rooms.

“The manageability, ease of use, universal access and scalability of these breakthrough solutions will further drive adoption of video collaboration by ensuring a more cost effective solution to all sizes of enterprise. This announcement further cements the faith Kathea has in Polycom in ensuring our customers receive the latest and most innovative solutions on the market,” says Divesh Nathoo, Pre-sales manager at Kathea.

Polycom’s next-generation portfolio includes solutions available to customers of all sizes, including a specific portfolio designed for mid-market customers, to deliver affordable solutions that are easy to use and manage. The mid-market portfolio includes: RealPresence Collaboration Server 800s, Virtual Edition; high quality RealPresence Group 300 for smaller spaces or huddle rooms; RealPresence Desktop 2.0 and RealPresence Mobile 2.0.

Polycom’s new offerings provide the broadest multi-vendor integration with support for both open-standards and proprietary protocols, including H.263, H.264 High Profile, RTV (Microsoft), TIP, and now SVC. Polycom RealPresence solutions connect to millions of existing standards-based UC solutions (whether Microsoft, Cisco, Avaya, IBM, Siemens, HP, or mixed) and potentially hundreds of millions of future SVC-based solutions on leading UC platforms such as Microsoft Lync.

Availability
Availability varies per product and per region, with rollout planned to start in November 2012. For more information visit www.polycom.co.uk or contact Kathea..