Polycom is the only company which delivers end-to-end, rich media collaborative applications for voice, video, data and the Web from the desktop and mobile personal systems to room systems to the network core. It provides the most lifelike experience for communication and remote meetings from anywhere to anywhere, instantly. 

By leveraging its leadership in all the aspects of a face-to-face meeting that include hearing each other (audio), seeing each other (video) and showing each other things (content), Polycom makes meeting over distance just like being there. Yugal Sharma, Country Manager, Polycom India, says, “We enable rapid and collaborative decision-making cutting short the chains of communication over distance.”

With global headquarters in the U.S., Polycom is the industry leader in unified collaborative solutions. As the globe is shrinking and becoming smaller, the need of the hour is to have effective collaborative solutions for the enterprises. In 2003, Polycom decided to set up an Indian subsidiary. Since then, it has been a good journey for Polycom in India. Yugal says, “With such a huge geography coupled with a massive nationwide fibre network throughout the country, we have grown over 51% CAGR.”

Polycom is at the forefront of eGovernance initiatives. For example, the state of Andhra Pradesh has adopted Polycom solution in its judicial reforms programme. Basically, Polycom solutions are used to connect all the jails in Andhra Pradesh. Sharma says, “We are also aggressive on the health and education fronts. There is a clear divide in the population of urban and rural. 75 per cent of the professionally qualified people are residing in the 25 per cent of the country, which means people who can impart high education live in top 10 metros and the people who want this knowledge transfer from them are residing unfortunately in other 75% of the country. There is a big divide, which cannot be bridged unless technology helps it.”

He adds,” “Similarly, health ratio is really inverted in the country. There are people across the country who are not able to get the right treatment. By the time they come to the large hospitals, they reach at the critical stage of their life. With technology like video- enabled Telemedicine, this scenario can be avoided. If the first level of doctor in a village cannot rectify the problem, with the help of the technology, doctors sitting anywhere in big hospitals can locate the patient and diagnose her.” The true role of the eGovernance lies precisely in this type of applications. Most initiatives that Government has taken will help in bridging the health and education divide. The Government of India has taken a big initiative across the country. Through a programme called SWAN (State Wide Area Networks), it has tried to create a super-information highway up to the village level providing high-speed connectivity. The objective is to run application through video, voice and data. It can improve health and education, help people in E-Mandi, microfinance, etc.

Polycom provides solutions for enterprises to solve their day-to-day business and help in their critical decision-making. Since India is a vast country, through video technology there can be interaction with supervisors, team leaders to collaborate and connect to take care of day-to-day businesses, and Polycom plays a very critical role. Polycom brings high-definition technology to the boardroom, the quality of which is seen in televisions at the broadcast level. Polycom has a solution which identifies fingerprints. Even there is a solution for the vendor who can identify a fake currency note. 

It is Polycom, which is the first in the industry to innovate and bring the video- conferencing technology to the desktop. Sharma says, “We are the first one in the industry to develop video software which costs $150 and it can be easily plugged on to the laptop or PC and can be fully functional for video-conferencing.” 

Apart from government applications and enterprises, India has become a hotspot of retail industry and there have been big buyers of video applications in India. Secondly, India has also become a major exporting country of various goods. Customers sitting in Europe, USA and other countries can easily look at the sample and finalize their specifications just sitting in a single place. Here, Polycom plays a major role.

The advantage is that Polycom is a completely standard-based solution provider. Sharma says, “We work heavily on SIP and solutions are open standards based.”

India is a thriving country from the perspective of remote applications. Looking at the opportunities, Polycom has chalked out a very clear business plan for India. The company works with distributors and resellers across the country. There are two distributors, i.e. Ingram Micro and Bharti with which Polycom works very happily. Apart from these, the company also works with Reliance as its direct engagement. Polycom has different partners in different parts of country who look after different products. Sharma says, 

“We have pan-India partners like HCL, Godrej, etc., who have national presence. Similarly, we have regional partners who look after that particular market. In the third category, we have partners focussed on various vertical market segments. For example, to address defence vertical, we have five partners and for railways, we have two partners. Similarly, we have sixty partners for corporates.”

The company has identified and designated partners in terms of different product categories, geographic categories, market segment categories, etc. And, this is how Polycom manages its partners. Besides, there are service provider partners also. 

Finally 
The overall market space Polycom works in is unified collaborative communication space. In the collaborative space, there are various players and the market size is guestimated to be in the region of 300–400 million dollars and it is growing. As per IDG, the growth is around 25–27 per cent CAGR for the next five to ten years. And, Polycom being the leader in the space, it should not be difficult for them to cope with the growth.