Last week Polycom introduced the RealPresence Clairiti cloud collaboration infrastructure platform. We spoke with Roger Farnsworth, Head of Marketing, Infrastructure and Services at Polycom about what RealPresence Clariti is and why technology decision makers want to take a look.
TD: What is Polycom’s RealPresence Clariti?
RF: Polycom’s RealPresence Clariti is simple, powerful, cloud-ready collaboration infrastructure that lets any customer that has a need to bring high-quality audio, video and content to collaboration to a wide range of users both internally and externally. It does that in way that’s technology-agnostic, able to embrace multiple UC platforms and strategies, and can grow with the customer to meet their business needs and collaboration challenges going forward.
TD: Could you explain the hybrid cloud capability of RealPresence Clariti.
RF: Sure. The first thing I’d like to point out is that RealPresence Clariti is enhanced licensing that gives our customers access to all the features and functionality that they’ll need to be successful. That includes video bridging, audio bridging, device registration and management, firewall traversal, analytics and management, recording and streaming – all the things they need to be successful. The most common usage of this technology starts with virtual meeting rooms where teams can get together, collaborate in real time, share information and capture ideas to be innovative. What this hybrid cloud capability, and the cloud ready capability of RealPresence Clariti, will offer is access to a hybrid cloud burst service that will allow customers to seamlessly extend their collaboration experience into the Polycom cloud during either unexpected periods of overcapacity or during planned and temporary large events that will demand resources beyond their licensing framework. So this is a hybrid cloud use of infrastructure as a service to enhance and protect the experience that our customers are expecting with RealPresence Clariti.
TD: How do Polycom Sandbox and Polycom RealAccess factor into the system?
RF: Polycom RealAccess is our cloud-based services delivery platform that basically provides big data and connected product value to our extended customer base. With versions for both partners and customers, we have the ability to drive real business value through the presentation of things like tutorial videos to show how and when to use video and visual collaboration to greatest affect. RealAccess includes asset management capability that gives simple click-and-view access to the type of assets customers are using in their environment, to show them where and when they’re being used. We also have basic and advanced analytics options for RealAccess that provides such things as capacity and utilization insight, call quality, success, failure and when, and integration with our global services platforms to let customers know the status of their support contracts and how and when they have experience Polycom’s services interactions in the past. RealAccess is a powerful way of helping our partners and customers understand the real ways that visual collaboration is helping them, and then help them be much more proactive and productive in the procurement and deployment of those tools.
The Sandbox that you asked about is one way that Polycom is making it easier than ever for our partners and customers to take advantage of the software development toolkits and application program interfaces that Polycom has been building into our collaboration infrastructure for some time. Instead of making a partner who is interested in developing value-add applications purchase and deploy a full Polycom RealPresence Calriti instance in order to test against, we will make, as part of our developer support framework, access to a cloud-hosted sandbox available to those partners and to customers who have a need to do that type of innovation. If they’re a part of our developer ecosystem they’ll get metered shared access to this sandbox that will allow them to do development in a shared environment on a first come first served basis. We will also have the option or developers to pay for exclusive access to a private cloud-hosted sandbox, and they’ll get the ability to have guaranteed access to that sandbox for a metered number of hours. The sandbox provides a low-cost opportunity for our partners to get into the application development game and make their mark on the collaborative landscape.
TD: Who should be considering RealPresence Clariti?
RF: I have to say, this product democratizes high quality and reliable visual collaboration and meeting services. One of the great things about Polycom’s RealPresence Clariti is that it extends the availability of these visual collaboration tools to organizations of all sizes. Starting at five concurrent collaborative participants, we can scale into the tens or hundreds of thousands. The prices for this solution, for a customer that has their own compute environment, are extremely attractive. We have reduced the get-in price for RealPresence Clariti to make it accessible to mid-sized businesses, and we have put scaling and licensing mechanisms in place for us to easily grow with customers as they continue to take advantage of the technology. Around the world we have customers that have scaled to hundreds of thousands of video users, and RealPresence Clariti extends that value well down in the food chain of customers to make it accessible to mid-sized customers as well.
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