BYOD video collaboration grows up

Collaboration over mobile networks is set to become one of the most important tools for the future, particularly as the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement gathers pace. And as it seems that everyone already has at least one mobile device, and often two, it is becoming important that businesses looking to exploit them can connect with large numbers of them.

This is the target for San Jose-based unified communications specialist, Polycom. It has just upgraded its RealPresence Resource Manager software to Version 8.0, which adds a 10x increase to the number of mobile devices that can be addressed.

This means that large enterprise users and service providers will now be able to support up to 50,000 video user registrants joining from mobile, desktop or group video systems. The company sees this helping IT organisations support the BYOD trend.

Polycom today also unveiled the RealPresence Video DualManager 400 solution, which is intended as a single, packaged solution for mid-sized enterprise business users.

This is a new platform offering, available on an industry-standard server, that provides resource management, broad call-control support and interoperability for midsized enterprise video networks. This is seen by the company as providing the centralised device and video traffic management required as the number of video conferencing systems and personal video users grows within an organisation.

Version 8.0 of the Resource Manager also features enhancements in monitoring, provisioning, and reporting; an API suite for custom app development integrations; more flexibility for scheduling calls; and additional virtual meeting room management capabilities.

Polycom has also announced updates to RealPresence Distributed Media Application (DMA v6.0). This provides enhanced video operator services with help-desk features such as on-demand support with dialing and added interactive voice response messaging that provides more information about the status of a call. It also gives enhanced call detail records for recording and billing, additional interoperability capabilities, support for multiple languages, and customisation options.

Resource Manager and the DMA software are included in the new DualManager 400 platform. Using this, customers should be able to drive down communication and administration costs, simplify collaboration set up for users, and protect existing IT investments by unifying different networks.

It features dynamic monitoring, provisioning and reporting for midsized organizations. This means IT managers can dynamically monitor, provision and report on 100 to 400 devices, and manage and distribute up to 150 concurrent calls across diverse video, voice and content collaboration networks.

It provides employee empowerment to control their own video meetings, as well as SIP-based SVC Call Management. The interoperability available with SVC-capable collaboration servers enables IT managers to manage the signaling and call control for SIP-based SVC calls.

DualManager 400 also offers a powerful and highly efficient migration path for the company’s CMA 4000 customers as they look to expand their video network to include the benefits of SVC, or extend video to browser-based users via the RealPresence CloudAXIS Suite.

“Organizations of all sizes are seeking to equip employees with video collaboration capabilities whether from the road, from home or right from their desks,” said A.E. Natarajan, Polycom’s Executive Vice President of Worldwide Engineering. “For large enterprises and service providers, the enhanced Resource Manager can help IT support BYOD since it’s optimised for the secure, highly scalable video collaboration that is being fueled by the proliferation of mobile and desktop video users.

“For midsized enterprises, the new RealPresence Video DualManager 400 is a single appliance that gives the IT organisation the intelligent infrastructure they need to make video collaboration always available so that their employees can have more productive meetings with their colleagues, partners and customers.”