POLYCOM SOLUTION HELPS ENTERPRISES SCALE VISUAL COMMUNICATION
Announcement posted by Polycom 22 Sep 2008
Unique network-based application unifies video conferencing infrastructure making it easier and more cost-effective to deliver enterprise-wide video services
To support the increasing use of visual communication in business, Polycom, Inc. (NASDAQ: PLCM), the global leader in telepresence, video and voice communications solutions, today announced the Polycom Distributed Media Application™ (DMA) 7000, a unique network-based application that manages and distributes multipoint video calls within an enterprise network environment. The Polycom DMA 7000 is designed to unify enterprise visual communication infrastructure, improving the efficiency, reliability and performance of video calls; and making it easier and more cost-effective for organisations to deliver on-demand video conferencing services to employees.
“There is a “perfect storm” of technological, business and economic factors driving greater adoption of video communications, which is having a profound impact on the scalability requirements of enterprise networks,” said Roopam Jain, principal analyst, conferencing and collaboration, Frost & Sullivan. “The Polycom DMA 7000 is uniquely designed to help large organisations spread ad-hoc video communication to thousands of users by improving the simplicity and reliability of the application, delivering scalability across a distributed network, and streamlining the management process to simplify deployment, administration and reduce costs.”
“Customers are deploying visual communication more broadly across their organisations as a critical communication tool, and want video services available for employees to use at any time,” said Joe Sigrist, senior vice president and general manager, Video Solutions, Polycom. “The DMA 7000 solution supports desktop, group and telepresence applications and makes it easier for customers to deploy on-demand video services broadly. This solution brings proven IP telephony practices to visual communication and leverages our experience in high-availability conferencing solutions for service provider networks to give enterprise customers carrier-class scalability, reliability and efficiency for delivering video services.”
Deployed on application servers, the DMA 7000 application manages and distributes video calls in a highly reliable and scalable method across multiple Polycom RMX 2000™ media servers, which are video conferencing “bridges” that allow multiple sites to join the same meeting, connect users on different networks and optimise the call experience between video endpoints with different capabilities. This distributed network design allows enterprises to connect and utilise main and branch office infrastructure systems together as part of a single, seamless solution.
This distributed model delivers significant advantages over the alternative model for high-scale video applications, which is a single video appliance with high port capacity. The increased scale, reliability and resource efficiency gains will help drive video adoption by increasing availability to end users, while also alleviating administrative concerns currently preventing large growth.
Advantages of the Polycom DMA 7000 include:
Cost-Effective Scalability – The Polycom DMA 7000 solution allows organisations to scale their video services as needed by easily adding additional media server resources without impacting current services or requiring significant administrative work. Resources can be increased by adding additional RMX media servers, or by adding greater capacity modules to existing RMX media servers, increasing the virtual pool of ports available across an organisation.
Improved Reliability and Fault Tolerance – The DMA 7000 features intelligent routing capabilities that improve reliability by automatically routing calls in real time around network outages or oversubscribed or unavailable media servers. The distributed network design also provides redundancy with modular components and no single point of failure. The solution supports hot standby application server redundancy, database redundancy and synchronisation, media server redundancy and geographical redundancy.
Simplified Video Network Administration – The DMA 7000 streamlines many administrative tasks like provisioning, reporting and system maintenance and upgrades. Typically, an administrator would provision users for a specific media server and in the event of an outage or if use exceeded capacity, would need to re-provision users to another server. The Polycom solution eliminates that issue by supporting Active Directory integration, utilising a common database and balancing call loads across all media server resources. Reporting is also streamlined through centralised collection of call details, logs, port utilisation, etc. The DMA 7000 supports zero downtime upgrades, which can also lower costs by allowing administrators to conduct system maintenance, update software or upgrade equipment during normal business hours without impacting video services.
The Polycom DMA 7000 is the latest development advancing the Polycom VC2 vision of video as a pervasive component of unified communication in the enterprise – enabling people to call anyone, anywhere, anytime from any device.
Additional Information:
Whitepaper – Scalable Infrastructure for Distributed Video
Pricing and Availability
Polycom DMA 7000 is planned for general availability in January 2009 with a recommended starting list price of US$69,000. Polycom solutions are available through certified Polycom channel partners.
“There is a “perfect storm” of technological, business and economic factors driving greater adoption of video communications, which is having a profound impact on the scalability requirements of enterprise networks,” said Roopam Jain, principal analyst, conferencing and collaboration, Frost & Sullivan. “The Polycom DMA 7000 is uniquely designed to help large organisations spread ad-hoc video communication to thousands of users by improving the simplicity and reliability of the application, delivering scalability across a distributed network, and streamlining the management process to simplify deployment, administration and reduce costs.”
“Customers are deploying visual communication more broadly across their organisations as a critical communication tool, and want video services available for employees to use at any time,” said Joe Sigrist, senior vice president and general manager, Video Solutions, Polycom. “The DMA 7000 solution supports desktop, group and telepresence applications and makes it easier for customers to deploy on-demand video services broadly. This solution brings proven IP telephony practices to visual communication and leverages our experience in high-availability conferencing solutions for service provider networks to give enterprise customers carrier-class scalability, reliability and efficiency for delivering video services.”
Deployed on application servers, the DMA 7000 application manages and distributes video calls in a highly reliable and scalable method across multiple Polycom RMX 2000™ media servers, which are video conferencing “bridges” that allow multiple sites to join the same meeting, connect users on different networks and optimise the call experience between video endpoints with different capabilities. This distributed network design allows enterprises to connect and utilise main and branch office infrastructure systems together as part of a single, seamless solution.
This distributed model delivers significant advantages over the alternative model for high-scale video applications, which is a single video appliance with high port capacity. The increased scale, reliability and resource efficiency gains will help drive video adoption by increasing availability to end users, while also alleviating administrative concerns currently preventing large growth.
Advantages of the Polycom DMA 7000 include:
Cost-Effective Scalability – The Polycom DMA 7000 solution allows organisations to scale their video services as needed by easily adding additional media server resources without impacting current services or requiring significant administrative work. Resources can be increased by adding additional RMX media servers, or by adding greater capacity modules to existing RMX media servers, increasing the virtual pool of ports available across an organisation.
Improved Reliability and Fault Tolerance – The DMA 7000 features intelligent routing capabilities that improve reliability by automatically routing calls in real time around network outages or oversubscribed or unavailable media servers. The distributed network design also provides redundancy with modular components and no single point of failure. The solution supports hot standby application server redundancy, database redundancy and synchronisation, media server redundancy and geographical redundancy.
Simplified Video Network Administration – The DMA 7000 streamlines many administrative tasks like provisioning, reporting and system maintenance and upgrades. Typically, an administrator would provision users for a specific media server and in the event of an outage or if use exceeded capacity, would need to re-provision users to another server. The Polycom solution eliminates that issue by supporting Active Directory integration, utilising a common database and balancing call loads across all media server resources. Reporting is also streamlined through centralised collection of call details, logs, port utilisation, etc. The DMA 7000 supports zero downtime upgrades, which can also lower costs by allowing administrators to conduct system maintenance, update software or upgrade equipment during normal business hours without impacting video services.
The Polycom DMA 7000 is the latest development advancing the Polycom VC2 vision of video as a pervasive component of unified communication in the enterprise – enabling people to call anyone, anywhere, anytime from any device.
Additional Information:
Whitepaper – Scalable Infrastructure for Distributed Video
Pricing and Availability
Polycom DMA 7000 is planned for general availability in January 2009 with a recommended starting list price of US$69,000. Polycom solutions are available through certified Polycom channel partners.