<div>Over the past few years, the way large organisations and governments communicate has changed drastically. One of biggest catalysts for this transformation has been the growth of video collaboration. It has changed the way they operate and communicate. It has also resulted in better access to public services, education, health and security. One of the biggest players in the video conferencing market is the $1.5- billion Polycom. <strong>Marc-Alexis Remond</strong>, director, enterprise solutions and market development for Polycom Asia Pacific was in India recently. Remond told BW's <strong>Anup Jayaram</strong> how the Indian video conferencing market is changing from pure video conferencing to that over tablets and other mobile devices.<br /><br /><em>Excerpts:</em><br /><strong><br />Do you see the spread of videoconferencing in companies across India? How is videoconferencing changing the way business is done?</strong><br /><br />Since I joined Polycom two years ago, I have been coming to India at least three times a year. India is a key market for Polycom, which explains the presence of many Polycom executives in the country. We are doing very well in India. In fact the Frost & Sullivan report of 2011 shows that Polycom is the leader in the market in terms of video conferencing as well as video conferencing infrastructure. From an end point perspective we have a 50.2 per cent and for the infrastructure 48 per cent market share. And we have seen year-on-year growth of 47 per cent and 57 per cent on infrastructure. So the market is growing about 20 per cent. So we are definitely growing faster than the market.<br /><br />But the key is for organisations to realise that they can do much more with video conferencing. If I tell you that the benefits of videoconferencing are all around—reduction of travel costs, time, and reduction of risks associated with travel, reduction of carbon emissions, would you agree?<br /><br />Well, ideally the video conferencing technology today can do much more for the enterprise, whether you are from the public or the private sector. In fact, studies and research have shown that yes you can save up to 30 per cent in travel costs, but also that in other industries you can shrink the recruitment time by 19 per cent. So for a fast growing organisation, they need to hire, interview a lot more employees, they can shorten the time by using the technology. The hiring manager and the interviewee do not need to travel. All this leads to a reduction in the time to onboard a person into an organisation.<br /><br />In some industries like the apparel industry, the time to market is critical. You have collections coming out for spring, summer, fall and winter. There are very short cycles between the design and the manufacturing stage. Here videoconferencing helps reduce time to market by 24 per cent. So you can imagine in the automotive and the consumer durables industry if you are the first one to launch that gives you a great competitive edge. In the manufacturing industry, we have seen that videoconferencing on the shop floor can be used for technical support. An engineer can be connected over video from the shop floor to a subject matter expert at another location to fix the equipment and reduce the downtime by 27 per cent.<br /><br />So basically, enterprises and public sector organisations need to look at the value of videoconferencing beyond travel. They need to look at how it can add value to their existing processes. Videoconferencing helps streamline processes and benefit different corporate functions.<br /><br />Different employees have different needs. A business executive would spend 30 per cent of his time outside office, 30 per cent at his desk and 30 per cent on travel. A sales person would spend 90 per cent of his time outside office; a marketing person or an accounts person would spend more time at their desk. The function of a person in an organisation will define their behaviour in terms of communication.<br /><br />So we are saying that you need an organisation to become a high performing workplace, you need to integrate three components—the processes, people and technology. When it comes to technology, it is not just video conferencing as a siloed solution for meetings only. It is part of the entire ICT solution of the company, because now video has gone mobile. It is available on mobiles, laptops and tablets. So sales people can now collaborate over video from customer locations and home to connect with the people in the organisation. Video has gone social.<br /><br />Today there are video applications for enterprise. These include Yammer, Jive for enterprise social connect. These solutions now integrate video.<br /><br /><strong>What is the current trend in videoconferencing and how is it changing?<br /></strong>The 2011 Frost & Sullivan report shows that everything is moving towards high-definition. That is what customers are looking for in India. The first concern that public and private companies have over HD in India is bandwidth. It is still quite expensive. So what Polycom has done to enable more video conference is to integrate a new protocol, H264, high profile. It reduces the bandwidth consumption by 50 per cent compared to other solutions in the market.<br /><br />The second trend that we see in India is that most customers have a couple of end points, with 4-5 locations. Now enterprises are looking at investing in infrastructure, which will enable multi-party connectivity over video and audio. So we are not talking of connecting from a conference room—but from a tablet, a personal computer or even from a mobile phone for audio.<br /><br />The other thing that we see is more and more people recording and streaming video. Many of them use it for training. So you are not able to see just the trainer, but the content that is being shown. That is recorded and put on the corporate intranet, and people can watch it when they want. And for those who are outside the office like your channel partners, who you need to train, there is a video streaming happening.<br /><br /><strong>Has demand for your products risen post the slowdown?<br /></strong>Whenever there is a slowdown, companies step back and take a look at their standings — be it travel related, investment or capex. So normally what we see is that during a slowdown, some of the projects may be delayed. Executives take a hard look at all expenses. Very quickly it goes back to normal for video conferencing as it is a great alternative to travel. Some companies that would have planned to invest in PCs would look to invest in videoconferencing because they did not have it in the past. So, Polycom is growing but it is not because of the slowdown in particular. It is because of the adoption of video conferencing overall.<br /><br /><strong>There are some sectors like education and healthcare where videoconferencing is big globally. Do you see that happening in India?<br /></strong>We do a couple of things here. We have solutions for the administration of hospitals and hospital networks. So just like they would use for conferences, training, project management, we have customers like Fortis HealthCare in India who have rolled out Polycom across their hospitals and integrated with their Microsoft link solution. So they have a complete unified and communication and collaboration solution for their employees all over India. <br /><br />We also do solutions for what we call continuing medical education. Medical information is increasing every day. So people need to upgrade their skills and knowledge. We bring video conferencing solutions all the way to the operating theatre, where a live surgery will happen and other doctors will watch it from remote locations. This is happening in the UK and in India at Lucknow. It is also used in telemedicine for both primary and specialty care. There is a lack of specialists in rural areas. It does not matter. People can go to a clinic or local hospital and be connected over video for all kinds of specialties.<br /><br />We do a lot of solutions for tertiary education as well as primary and secondary. It is all around e-learning. There are two components — download content when you are free. The other is live lectures. What we are seeing worldwide is that students are going less and less to the classroom. They have to review material before going to class online. Then they discuss it with the teacher. We provide a solution to capture the lectures, archive them and of course provide the live learning. It doesn’t matter where the teacher is located. They can connect smart boards to do annotation.<br /><br /><strong>What solutions do you have for small enterprises?</strong><br />It is not about how many employees you have or what is your revenue. You could be a law firm with 12 lawyers, but they are highly mobile and are located all over the country. You have a high need for collaboration. These people invest in video conferencing. You may be a manufacturer with a 1,000 employees at a single location. Your need for collaboration may not be that large. So you need to look at the number of sites you operate in and the kind of business you do — whether you provide services to people all over or you are a single site large business. Even a large manufacturer will need to be in touch with suppliers and channel partners. So the need for collaboration may not be internal, but be part of the overall supply chain.<br /><br /><strong>What is the most interesting application that you have seen?<br /></strong>I have seen very interesting applications in oil & gas which is called remote project management. Oil & gas and energy companies may have their headquarters in major cities, but their plants are located remotely. They use video conferencing to monitor the progress of the project.<br /><br /><strong>Who is your competition?<br /></strong>In the market, Cisco would be the second player. Because of that we made a commitment to support all vendors. So even if some organisations use the Cisco product, we will be able to connect to the Cisco systems even though some of them are based on proprietary standards by Cisco systems. The Cisco Telepresence (TPS) has a proprietary protocol called TIP. The TPS can talk to only other TPS. We have taken that protocol and embedded it in our RealPresence platform. So those who invest in the RealPresence solution can also connect to the TPS. So our customers are not restricted in the way they do videoconferencing.<br /><br /><strong>What about mobile videoconferencing?<br /></strong>Yes the boom of tablet PCs is happening in India too. It is like any other country. More and more people are bringing those devices to the office. Today we have an application—the Polycom RealPresence Mobile — which is available free of charge for download from the Android market and from the App Store. So people who download this application will be able to do point to point video conferencing free of charge. If you want to integrate this application as part of your enterprise video conferencing, you will be able to this. This application will be registered to a centralized server. The server will take care of authentication and encryption.<br /><br /> </div>
