Siemens and Polycom in UC partnership

January 21, 2018

Siemens Enterprise Communications Group and Polycom, Inc. today announced a strategic alliance and global resale agreement that will enable customers to leverage the productivity and cost-saving benefits of Polycom telepresence, high definition (HD) video conferencing solutions and desktop video collaboration applications through seamless integration with the OpenScape UC environment.

By adopting a state-of-the-art UC environment, organisations can not only take advantage of innovative video solutions from Polycom, but they can increase collaboration and customer responsiveness while reducing conferencing costs and the need for employee travel.

“Video communication is becoming a key component of UC, and helps to dramatically improve the productivity of our customers,” said Mark Stone, chairman and chief executive officer, the SEN Group.

“Working with Polycom enables us to deliver on our Open Communications commitment and enhance our leading OpenScape UC platform with a full range of UC-enabled video solutions.”

“Organisations across industries are adopting Polycom visual communication to drive efficiency and effectiveness among geographically dispersed teams and strengthen relationships with customers, partners and suppliers,” said Robert Hagerty, chairman and CEO of Polycom.

“Teaming with SEN Group, we are able to deliver these powerful collaboration capabilities within the core communication tools that people use every day, and, as an integrated component of the OpenScape UC solution, give customers a scalable platform that is easy to manage and use.

This supports Polycom’s Open Collaboration Network strategy and gives customers greater flexibility and investment protection for their UC environment.”

SEN Group is focused on helping customers achieve productivity and cost savings goals by helping to ease the adoption of video solutions that can help organisations collaborate more effectively as part of a complete, tightly integrated UC platform.

Under the global resale agreement, SEN Group will offer Polycom’s portfolio of visual communication solutions, including award-winning personal, room and immersive telepresence solutions, video conferencing systems, and desktop video collaboration applications.

This is supported by the industry’s most scalable and reliable visual communication infrastructure platform that delivers centralised management and provisioning; highly scalable multi-site, multi-network conferencing capabilities; network-aware firewall traversal; recording, streaming and video content management; and interoperability with other standards-based immersive telepresence systems and legacy video conferencing equipment.

Polycom RMX series conference bridges and HDX video endpoints integrate with the OpenScape Unified Communications Server, an innovative UC platform that takes advantage of industry standards such as SIP and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to help ease integration.

By leveraging a data centre approach, OpenScape voice and UC services can be over-laid in existing IT or telephony environments, eliminating traditional barriers between communications systems while providing unmatched scalability and flexibility when integrating with other popular enterprise-class solutions and devices.

This allows organisations to extend the benefit of UC features such as one number service to the desktop via Polycom conference bridges and video endpoints.

The SEN Group will also offer customers Polycom visual communication solutions supported by its OpenScale Services, a comprehensive portfolio of professional and managed services and solutions.

While many IT departments may lack the skill set or resources necessary to take on the integration of best-of-breed UC technologies, OpenScale Services are designed around proven best practices to help organisations quickly and cost-effectively integrate multi-vendor systems, delivering a UC environment.

In addition, SEN Group can provide 24×7 network and device monitoring from its global Video Network Operations Center, and working with Polycom, will be able to expand this managed services offering with dedicated, 24×7 maintenance and technical.