discussUC

Polycom, Inc. the global leader in telepresence, video and voice communications solutions, today announced its Board of Directors has named Andrew Miller president and chief executive officer, effective today.

Mr. Miller succeeds Robert Hagerty, who will step down as CEO, president, and chairman and is resigning from the Board. To facilitate a smooth transition, Mr. Hagerty will serve as an advisor to Mr. Miller and the Board. Concurrent with the CEO succession, David DeWalt, currently Polycom's lead independent director, will assume the role of chairman of the Board of Directors. The Board plans to appoint Mr. Miller to the Board of Directors shortly following this year's Annual Stockholders Meeting.

Mr. Miller, who joined Polycom in 2009 as executive vice president of Global Field Operations, has been successfully leading the Company's strategic initiatives to transform Polycom's go-to-market, build core strategic and service provider alliances, and launch the Polycom Open Collaboration Network.

"Andy Miller has been transformative in leading Polycom's shift to a more customer-centric execution model, which has already resulted in significant growth for the Company," said David DeWalt, Polycom chairman of the Board of Directors. "Andy's industry track record, proven leadership, and customer skills make him the ideal CEO to take Polycom to the next level. I also want to thank Bob Hagerty for growing Polycom from $37M to $1.1B over his 13 year tenure and for recruiting Andy to the Company, enabling this seamless succession."

"As the leading independent company in the fast-growing unified collaboration space, I believe Polycom is uniquely positioned to capture this significant market opportunity," said Mr. Miller. "Polycom has unbelievable employee talent at all levels of the organization, an amazing customer base, and a strong array of strategic and channel partnerships. With the same passion, intensity, and efficiency that has already produced better than planned results, I look forward to leading Polycom to greater customer intimacy and a stronger profit model. I want to thank Bob for his many years of excellent leadership."

"It has been an honor to have led such a talented group of directors, management members, and employees during my time at Polycom," said Mr. Hagerty. "Andy is a perfect successor to lead Polycom through its next phase of growth. I am truly proud of what we have achieved thus far, and I believe Polycom has a tremendous opportunity in the exciting collaboration market."

Mr. Miller has a 28-year proven track record in the video and networking industries. During his 11 years at Cisco, he held several senior leadership roles in Sales, Marketing, and Services. As CEO of Tandberg, another leading video solutions provider, he led the Company through a period of significant revenue and profit growth. Immediately prior to joining Polycom, he was global president of IPC Information Systems, a leading trading technology and network connectivity provider. Mr. Miller received his BS in Business Administration from the University of South Carolina. He is on the Board of Directors for BroadSoft, former chairperson for the Stanford Executive Education Program, and a former fellow at the Aspen Institute.

Mr. DeWalt joined the Polycom board of directors in November 2005 and is a technology industry veteran who currently serves as CEO and president of McAfee, Inc. Previously, Mr. DeWalt held various management positions at EMC, Oracle, and other leading software and technology companies.

Polycom will file a supplement to its proxy statement for its 2010 Annual Stockholders Meeting to reflect the above changes and that Mr. Hagerty is no longer a nominee for Polycom's Board of Directors.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking at Aberdeen’s CMO Summit 2009 in San Francisco on the topic of enabling collaboration in marketing teams. It was a fun experience and the audience asked some great questions. In most organizations, marketing as a line of business (functional department) has one of the highest demands for effective collaboration due to the creative and iterative nature of every day work flows. Following is a quick synopsis of my presentation I gave yesterday to Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) and marketing leaders from companies with some of the world's leading brands.

The organizational pressures of pushing both short term performance and long term brand building initiatives rest squarely on the shoulders of the CMO. Increased customer complexity in an age of new forms of media and social networking further add to the CMO's challenges. In addition, ever changing cultural and lifestyle choices among staff members and target markets makes the role of CMO one of the more hot seat executive positions in any company.

Further, strategic marketing initiatives in response to the pressures, complexity, and trends can often create fragmented marketing teams or “silos” which impact overall marketing department productivity by creating distance and communication barriers. The ability of marketing leaders to reduce distance barriers to enable collaboration and empowerment among staff members can ultimately lead to more streamlined marketing teams capable of faster decision making, better sharing and coordination of plans, goal setting and problem setting, and ultimately project option decisions, particularly in times of crises management.

Enter the importance of collaboration solutions for marketers – getting teams to work together closely on projects to achieve common goals. Voice and video conferencing, content sharing, and telepresence technologies can enable marketing teams to bust through silos and collaborate effectively regardless of their physical location. The application of collaboration solutions into marketing work flows can be in any number of everyday business processes including the following:

• Global Team Meetings
• Virtual 1:1s with CMO
• Strategic Planning Sessions
• Creative Process
• Project and Event Management
• Product Definition, Launch, and Life Cycle Management
• Design Review and Approval
• Editor and Analyst Briefings
• Sales Training
• Customer Demos and Presentations
• Partner Meetings and Councils

The benefits and business value of effective collaboration are quickly apparent to the entire marketing organization at multiple levels: work flow, employees, partners, and company ROI. Benefits will flow down through the department in the form of sharpened marketing processes and efficiency, impressive innovation and creative thinking, better decision making and moral levels of employees. Customers and partners will be more loyal due to tighter relationships with your team. The company as a whole will also see results with a faster time to market on new products and initiatives, reduced costs and carbon footprint, and ultimately increased shareholder value.

Put collaboration tools in place for your marketing organization - you will clearly see enhanced efficiency, productivity, and creativity leading both short term performance and long term results!

Authors: Cisco

Authors: Julia White

I am thrilled to announce the Exchange ActiveSync Logo Program that helps IT Professionals manage mobile devices more effectively. Many of you rely on Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) to provide security and policy control to smartphones and slates that access your Exchange Server. Today, the Microsoft Exchange team is announcing a...

Authors: Dean Howarth

In this post I’d like to talk about how the Microsoft Partner ecosystem offers customers a real choice when they need help transforming their communications platforms. Black & Veatch, an engineering, consulting, and construction company, was faced with an outdated telephony system and an increasingly mobile...

Authors: Julia White

Severstal is one of Russia’s largest steel and mining companies.  With 92,000 employees in 10 countries, Severstal had been on Lotus Notes since 2003.  But as the company grew rapidly, Severstal was finding that it was difficult to integrate Notes with

Codelco, the world's largest copper mining company is 'All In' with BPOS!  Today on the MS Online blog we are proud to provide a guest post by Marco Orellana, CIO of Codelco. You can also watch a great video interview between Marco and Chris Capossela, SVP of Microsoft Business Division.  Codelco is a Chilean State owned copper mining company formed in 1976 with headquarters in Santiago. It is the largest copper producing company in the world with more than 18,000 workers and pre-tax profits of over $4 billion in 2009.

There is a great storyline's here with this customer win.

Codelco has taken advantage of the Microsoft Online 'deskless' product to provide email to mine workers who were once disenfranchised from IT because of cost.  This is EXACTLY what Forrester analyst, Ted Schadler wrote about in last years report,  "Tier Your Workforce To Save Money With Cloud-Based Corporate Email; Forrester Finds Customers Can Save “$1.3 Million Annually With Exchange Online Deskless Worker” Given the flexibility of the BPOS suite, customers can buy solutions that map to their needs.  If you want just mail, Exchange Online is available.  If you want just SharePoint, we'll support that as well.  And if you have workers who need to participate in the flow of information and replace the 'bulletin board' in the break room, we can support a lighter weight solution for them via the deskless offering.  NET.

They selected BPOS because as opposed to other solutions in the market, you don't under-buy for your core Information Workers with 'good enough' or over-buy for the task, deskless worker with huge inboxes, video, IM, etc.  IT can meet business needs in a agile and cost effective way by managing all the workforce on one central system and bring the workforce together so they can focus on mining not stitching together IT across disparate solutions.  Win-Win.

Over the last several weeks, I've been proud to highlight why customers of all sizes, geographies and industries have picked Microsoft over Google Apps. Some have left Google after realizing 'it's more pony than horse', others gave it a test drive and found out quickly it was 'more showroom than track ready'.  (Sorry, I couldn't resist) . Despite the hype machines running overtime at the GooglePlex in Mountain View, customers are voting with their feet to pick Microsoft.

This is why I am excited to highlight two more customers who have decided to share their reasons why Microsoft has become their trusted software vendor. As always, if you want more customer examples or content that outlines how our solutions differ to Google, you can always visit this website.

Leaving Google.  Why Even Free Google Apps Wasn't Worth It

Jared Morgan from Bradshaw and Weil in Paducah, KY has written a guest post over on the MS Online blog about their experience leaving Google Apps Standard Edition for MS Online. Standard edition is a free offering from Google that is limited to 50 users. They see the tremendous value in BPOS to now pay for the suite of services. Jared shares why as a small business the cloud offers a cost effective way to remain agile while gaining access to technology previously out of reach due to cost and on site company support. My favorite part about Jared's post is his singling out of SharePoint Online as a key benefit of the BPOS Suite, "What I thought I was getting as a simple throw-in with BPOS, SharePoint Online has turned out to be as valuable as Exchange Online, if not more so."

SharePoint is the fastest growing product in the history of Microsoft. It's received numerous accolades from industry analysts including top placement in all related Gartner Magic Quadrants. Imagine being a small business with under 50 employees and having access to such a product via the cloud? It's no surprise why SharePoint is a winner for Bradshaw and Weil and 'Why Microsoft' is an affirmative statement and not question at all.

Future Proofing Your Business - Cloud on Your Terms with Microsoft

On the Exchange Blog, David Aird, Head of IT for MITIE, a strategic outsourcing and asset management company, shares his insights into why they selected Exchange over Google Apps. He explains how Microsoft provides flexibility they need and how Google is an ultimatum full of hidden costs. We are the only company in the industry that allows you to run your solutions on prem, in the cloud, hosted with a partner or a hybrid. That means that companies like Bradshaw and Weil who are 'All In' can embrace the cloud immediately and for companies like MITIE, they can still run the systems themselves but by being on Microsoft, they have a product that is 'future proofed' because it allows them an 'on ramp' to go to the cloud on their terms.

"We looked at Google. They were competitively priced but with only three years in the productivity space, they lacked maturity and seemed like a risky investment… Ultimately, we choose Exchange 2007 for its manageability, reliability and enterprise class support. Despite all the recent focus on the cloud, we're not quite ready to move our data outside of our immediate control. When we do, we'll do it on our terms rather than being forced into a fit that's not right for our business." (see post for full transcript. I pulled from two paragraphs)

Stay tuned for more customer stories in the coming weeks as we continue to highlight 'Why Microsoft'.

Authors: IBM