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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: Nadee Gunasena

Authors: Nadee Gunasena

Authors: Nadee Gunasena

Authors: Lync Team

We have won a lot of projects with customers who were considering some of our competitors’ products. I took a closer look at what makes Lync a better solution for these customers, and what I found was that customers believe Lync stands above its competition because of features that are easy to use and the interoperation...

Licensing Communications Server “14” Voice and Conferencing

It has been a busy spring! We provided a first look at Communications Server “14” capabilities at VoiceCon Orlando, published a Microsoft response to the associated IP PBX RFP, and, with other industry leaders, launched the UC Interoperability Forum, or UCIF, a non-profit, open alliance of worldwide technology companies working together to help customers fully realize the potential of unified communications (UC). Customers confirm the importance of UC interoperability every day when they use our products with their existing gear. In fact, my colleague, Jamie Stark, posted an update on our UC Open Interoperability Program (UCOIP) earlier this week, and gave examples of different customers taking advantage to replace, enhance, or add to their existing IP PBX systems with Communications Server functionality today.

This post provides more information on the licensing changes coming with Communications Server “14” (CS “14) described in the April 15 Microsoft Volume Licensing brief. In a nutshell, with “14” we are offering separate licenses for our enterprise voice functionality and our unified conferencing functionality. This allows customers to choose whether to license our voice, our conferencing, or both. With Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 R2, a single license covers both conferencing and voice, and customers can only license voice and conferencing together. The difference is shown in the tables below. (The name of the new license is shown in quotes as it is not final.)

The brief also explains that the price of the CS “14” Enterprise CAL will be lower than the price of the OCS 2007 R2 Enterprise CAL, and that customers who purchase the OCS R2 Enterprise CAL before the release of CS “14” and maintain their Software Assurance (SA) will have access rights equivalent to the rights under the “Voice” CAL for the CS “14” release at minimum.

The effect is that existing customers who meet the requirements will get the complete set of enterprise voice functionality we deliver in CS “14” for no additional charge. Some of them will get CS “15” as well.

What about new customers?

A new customer who wants to add Communications Server-based instant messaging, presence, and conferencing to their existing IP PBX system, but who is not yet ready to use our voice capability, will pay less using the CS “14” licensing than they would using the OCS 2007 R2 licensing. The reason is that, as noted above, the CS “14” Enterprise CAL, which is specific to conferencing, costs less than the OCS 2007 R2 Enterprise CAL, which includes both conferencing and voice. The new customer will not pay for voice functionality until they’re ready to use it.

How about a new customer who wants to replace their IP PBX with Communications Server “14”? For example, how would the new structure affect the price for the Microsoft submission to the VoiceCon Orlando IP PBX RFP? To give some background – the VoiceCon show, now Enterprise Connect, issues a mock IP PBX RFP each spring and invites PBX vendors such as Cisco, Avaya, Alcatel, and Siemens to provide a written response, including system level pricing, and participate in a panel discussion at the show. Although we are not a PBX vendor, we participated this year to demonstrate the completeness of our CS “14” voice offer. The pricing in our response is based on the OCS 2007 R2 structure, and is really good. The list price in the Microsoft proposal – including IP phones, gateways, and servers -- is lower than the discounted prices from all other vendors except one. And our discounted price is the lowest. (You can see the pricing summary in a previous blog from me or you can watch a video of the full session by Allan Sulkin.)

If we used the CS “14” licensing for the VoiceCon RFP response, our price would have been even better. The reason is that the new “Voice” CAL will also cost less than the OCS 2007 R2 Enterprise CAL, and includes our full set of telephony features including ad hoc audio conferencing as required by the RFP. As such, a CS “14” bid for a PBX RFP that specifies the CS “14” Standard CAL and “Voice” CAL would be lower than the existing OCS 2007 R2 bid that specifies the OCS 2007 R2 Standard CAL and Enterprise CAL.

A new customer will pay more with CS “14” than OCS 2007 R2 if they want to use our full set of voice and conferencing capabilities to replace or enhance their existing IP PBX systems, but they’ll also get more, including call admission control for voice and video, support for Enhanced 9-1-1, survivable branch telephony, and multiple options for data center resiliency. Our analysis shows that a full Microsoft “14” UC solution including all the functionality covered by the CS “14” Standard, Enterprise, and “Voice” CALs would still be more cost effective than the plain old IP telephony offers from the other vendors that participated in the VoiceCon RFP session.

We offer great value to customers with “14”, and give them the ability to choose how much of our UC stack to use in order to best meet their unique needs.

BJ Haberkorn

OCS Product Management

The Worldwide Partner Conference kicked off this morning, and over 9,400 Microsoft partners are joining us in DC. The Worldwide Partner Conference (‘WPC’) is our largest partner event of the year and provides an opportunity to meet with partners, congratulate and celebrate our partners’ successes, and share our business priorities for the upcoming year. This year is particularly significant with the upcoming Communications Server “14” launch and our team is excited about the opportunities this brings our partners.

A growing and robust partner ecosystem

Communications Server provides a platform for partners to offer a number of complementary solutions that provide flexibility and choice to customers. Many of our partners that adopted the software transformation of communications early are already seeing increased revenue, finding new business opportunities and tapping into markets that they would not have been able to access with the limited solutions from traditional communications vendors.

Three years ago, Microsoft was a newcomer at VoiceCon with just a handful of partners on the expo floor. At this year’s VoiceCon show (March 2010), more than 75% of the vendors are partnering with Microsoft Communications Server – either interoperating their solutions delivering complementary products such as devices, gateways and solutions. Twelve partners simultaneously announced new solutions for Microsoft Communications Server “14” at VoiceCon. These solutions spanned survivable branch office appliances, enhanced 9-1-1 call routing services, new contact center solutions and more.

Polycom and Aastra, who announced their low cost IP desk phones at VoiceCon, made further announcements at WPC. Available in the fourth quarter of 2010, Polycom’s CX series phones are affordably priced from MSRP U.S. $199 for the CX500 IP phone, designed for use in public areas, and $299 for the CX600 IP desktop phone. These low cost IP desk phones enable a broader set of customers to deploy and use Communications Server “14”.

Additionally, HP, Juniper Networks and Brocade are participating in Microsoft’s Network Optimization program, which optimizes the performance between the network and Communications Server to deliver the most reliable business communications including presence, instant messaging, conferencing, video and voice.  In addition, BT is our newest SIP Trunking partner following their recent qualification with Microsoft Communications Server.

In addition to our technology partners, we are also excited about the successes and growth of our services partner eco-system. A number of partners providing services based on Exchange and SharePoint are now expanding their business by offering the full Unified Communications stack, adding Instant Messaging, Conferencing and Enterprise Voice via Communications Server. Many of the traditional voice partners have also created Communications Server practices because they are seeing more and more customer demand and relevance for a software based solution.

Why is this upcoming release of Communication Server ‘14’ significant for partners?

Communications Server “14” enables partners to expand service offerings. Communications Server is now a complete communications system that provides IM, rich Presence, Conferencing and Enterprise Voice without needing to rip or replace legacy systems.

Key service opportunities for partners include adding IM/presence, deploying conferencing, and replacing or enhancing legacy communications. These communications and collaboration capabilities can be added to a customer’s environment as part of a routine software upgrade cycle. Adding services like these can generate incremental revenue for partners in the 20% range, compared to the 5-7% hardware margin many partners already recognize. Adding services is just the beginning.

Many partners are already leveraging the extensible platform of Communications Server to develop new applications that include built in communications capabilities for their customers. Truly understanding their customers’ business and helping to streamline and increase customer revenue helps these develop deeper relationships with their customers.

“We’ve found that by using OCS as a platform, deployment is not the end of the engagement – it is the start of a long-lasting business relationship.” - Kevin Ross, Product Sales and Marketing Director, Geomant

Our vibrant partner ecosystem is our best asset for assisting customers to build out a communications infrastructure that is integrated, unified, optimized and cost effective. These partners are developing solutions and delivering services that provide customer choice to best meet their specific communications needs. This momentum is a sign that our partner community believes in our Unified Communications vision.

Are you attending WPC this year? Join us for the Communications Server “14” breakout and interactive sessions in the Business Productivity track Monday afternoon. And stop by the Business Productivity booth (#155) on the expo floor this week to see the demo of our upcoming release.

Kind Regards,

Kristin Murray, UC Partner Marketing

Authors: IBM