Polycom sees video conferencing future in software, rebrands platform

The fight for share in the videoconferencing market continues to heat up; newcomers to the market are bringing cheaper, higher quality solutions to once wary businesses looking to get on board.

Industry stalwart Polycom (Nasdaq: PLCM), at last week's ITExpo, said it was backing a trend away from expensive hardware endpoints to more affordable software solutions. The company rolled out its own software strategy that it said would bring secure HD video collaboration to the broadest range of business, video, mobile and social networking applications through a  standards-based infrastructure.

Polycom said the plan would redefine the unified communications market and accelerate adoption of its software. The company called the strategy key and said it was expecting to double the company's current run rate of approximately $1.5 billion to $3 billion in the next few years.

"Our software is at the core of enabling a highly differentiated customer experience," said Andy Miller, president and CEO of Polycom.

As part of its new strategy, Polycom rebranded its IC Intellegent Core video collaboration software. The product now will be called RealPresence Platform, and will, Polycom said, take an open-standards approach to integrate with various unified communications applications.

For more:
- see this release
- see this CRN article

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