Polycom RealPresence Platform to Power Telecom Group Video

Polycom® RealPresence™ Platform to Power Telecom Group Video-as-a-Service (VaaS) Offerings in New Zealand

New Zealand – 18 October, 2012: Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM) the global leader in open standards-based unified communications (UC), today announced that Telecom Group, New Zealand’s largest telecommunications company, will utilise the Polycom® RealPresence™ Platform as its software infrastructure of choice to deliver Video-as-a-Service (VaaS) offerings to New Zealand business customers.

Together with Telecom Group, Polycom is driving a new era of collaboration in response to the growing need amongst New Zealand organisations for easy-to-use rich media communications solutions that improve collaboration and accelerate operations.

Telecom will utilise the Polycom® RealPresence™ Platform to power both Gen-i (Telecom’s ICT services division) and Telecom hosted video offerings, benefiting from its unique open-standards approach, which ensures interoperability with hundreds of unified communications, business and social network applications, bridging video collaboration silos and truly unifying communications across the enterprise.

The Polycom RealPresence Platform seamlessly integrates with Gen-i and Telecom core networking and security infrastructure to deliver secure collaboration across heterogeneous networks with up to 50 percent less bandwidth consumption than other solutions. The RealPresence Platform provides true carrier-grade reliability and scale which service providers need to deliver VaaS offerings to potentially millions of service subscribers in SMBs, enterprises, and government organisations.

In addition, Polycom last week announced that RealPresence Platform now supports the industry’s first open standards-based SVC (Scalable Video Coding) protocol, with 3X HD multipoint video call capacity for greater scalability, dramatically lower TCO, superior performance, and backwards- and forwards-compatibility to protect customer investments.

Gen-i and Telecom VaaS offerings will deliver face-to-face communication and collaboration capabilities to customers through a subscription based model, providing businesses with access to the full suite of Polycom’s video systems, including availability over tablet and mobile devices. All hosting, management and provisioning will be managed by Gen-i and Telecom.

“In today’s competitive market, New Zealand businesses are tasked with finding the most efficient and cost-effective ways to accelerate operations,” said Leanne Buer, Acting GM Marketing, Gen-i Australasia. “We work alongside a broad range of corporate, government and business customers who are looking for new ways to connect with customers and staff who are on the move or working remotely. With our new cloud-based Video as a Service offering, in partnership with Polycom, we are making it easier and more affordable for our customers to deploy video across their organisations. It’s as simple-to-use as setting up a mobile phone service,” she added.

“Organisations have seen such strong results with on-premise video collaboration and they’re now looking to expand that face-to-face collaborative power via the cloud or in a hybrid private (on premises) and public cloud model. Delivering video as a service offering on a pay-for-use model vastly reduces the up-front investment to almost nothing, so organisations can begin to reap the benefits of video collaboration as fast and as inexpensively as possible,” said Gary Denman, Managing Director, Polycom Australia and New Zealand. “Polycom’s goal is to make it possible for everyone to use video as their preferred way to collaborate – easily, reliably, and securely – no matter where they are. Working with service providers such as Telecom Group is instrumental to achieve this goal of video ubiquity.”

In a move to further expand the ubiquity of video collaboration, Polycom last week, also unveiled Polycom® RealPresence™ CloudAXIS™ Suite (see related press release), which lets Polycom customers easily add anyone on Skype®, Facebook®, Google Talk™ and other business video applications to their video conferences from a browser. RealPresence CloudAXIS is a suite of software that runs on the Polycom® RealPresence™ Platform in private enterprise clouds or public clouds, and securely extends enterprise-grade video and content collaboration outside the firewall to other businesses (B2B) and consumers (B2C) via a browser to enable truly ubiquitous video collaboration at the highest quality, reliability, and security.

The RealPresence CloudAXIS Suite is ideal for Polycom partners and service providers to expand from offering Video-as-a-Service (VaaS) to Video Collaboration-as-a-Service (VCaaS) – adding applications such as recording and streaming, web conferencing, and collaboration tools (e.g., digital whiteboards) – thus creating greater customer value and new revenue streams.

About Telecom
Telecom New Zealand is New Zealand's largest telecommunications company. It provides information and communication technology (ICT) services to more than one million fixed line residential and small business customers, more than two million consumer and business mobile customers, and services more than 800,000 broadband connections.
Telecom works for its customers through the Telecom Retail division, which supports residential and small business customers, and its ICT division Gen-i, which supports corporate, government and business clients.
The company owns and operates significant national infrastructure, including the XT mobile network and the core fibre optic network that connects New Zealand's major towns and cities. It also owns AAPT, an Australian telecommunications company and has a 50% share in the Southern Cross international cable network.
Telecom also contributes generously to the community through the Telecom Foundation, the umbrella organisation for the company’s charitable and community-based initiatives.

About Polycom
Polycom is the global leader in open standards-based unified communications (UC) solutions for voice and video collaboration, trusted by more than 415,000 customers around the world. Polycom solutions are powered by the Polycom® RealPresence™ Platform, comprehensive software infrastructure and rich APIs that interoperate with the broadest set of communication, business, mobile and cloud applications and devices to deliver secure face-to-face video collaboration in any environment. Polycom and its ecosystem of over 7,000 partners provide truly unified communications solutions that deliver the best user experience, highest multi-vendor interoperability, and lowest TCO. Visit http://www.polycom.au or connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to learn how we’re pushing the greatness of human collaboration forward.
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© 2012 Polycom, Inc. All rights reserved. POLYCOM®, the Polycom logo, and the names and marks associated with Polycom’s products are trademarks and/or service marks of Polycom, Inc. and are registered and/or common law marks in the United States and various other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

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