ITWire

The new software, the Polycom RealPresence CloudAXIS Suite, was the centrepiece of a series of product announcements by the company this morning, Australian time, that it said represented the biggest product launch in its 22 year history, the fruits of two years of R&D and that signalled its shift from, predominantly, a supplier of hardware-based video collaboration products to a supplier of software.

Michael Chetner, Polycom's Asia Pacific VP, told iTWire that, currently the majority of the company's video revenue came from dedicated hardware running its software but that 85 percent of the company's R&D budget now went into software.

"Our vision is to deliver video to the masses and to grow the market," Chetner said. "If we continue to operate in the niche industry that is video collaboration we are not going to achieve the power of what video can provide. We are talking, potentially, of have having a smaller share of a much much bigger pie. And cloud is the way to do that."

Polycom expects the video collaboration market to grow at a CAGR of 16 percent over the next few years, reaching a value of $US12b globally by 2015. It also envisages its market shifting from end user organisations to providers who will deliver services from the cloud: those that are already providers of network services and other from 'left field'.

Chetner said: "To get the scale and increase the market we need to be aligning with partners that have the customer base and the network access," and he suggested that the ubiquitous access provided by the NBN would create opportunities for non-telecom service providers.

'I expect to see some models we have not seen before [as a result of the NBN]. For example health funds: how can they facilitate GPs and medical specialists together [to provide video services] for their customers? They would be able to do that by becoming a service provider of the NBN."

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