NEWS

Randel Maestre Global Director, Enterprise Solutions, Polycom

It is quite interesting that with the recent financial crisis, there is a growing opportunity for the collaboration platform provider and for Polycom, it is surely the reaping time. On the other side also, for the enterprises, it is high time to adopt video conferencing and save huge amount of investment. Talking to VARIndia, Randel Maestre, Global Director, Enterprise Solutions, Polycom, reveals his strategy in India. Excerpts...

Which industry will take maximum advantage of video conferencing and collaboration?
I think all the industries can take advantage of video conferencing and collaboration. Traditionally, video conferencing has been used in the industries like government, medical and education, but now we see a clear adoption by the enterprises including industries like manufacturing, finance, retail, hospitality and a host of others. In manufacturing, particularly in India, companies like to improve operational efficiencies, improve products quality and strengthen relationships with the buyers and, at the same time, like to improve service and support. The collaboration tools allow companies to do that. Now talking about collaboration tools, it is more than just video conferencing. People, while talking about video conferencing, think of a technology for the boardroom only, but we want to use video conferencing, voice solutions, wireless, infrastructure solution and content sharing as a combined solution to really help the companies in their day-to-day operations. Away from boardrooms, these technologies can enable the companies to ensure their day-to-day operations.

Another thing is that people are talking about green earth and video conferencing helps it by keeping the people connected and at the same time reducing the carbon emissions on the earth.

What kind of market trend you see in the collaboration space?
According to Gartner group, for the CIOs collaboration will remain as one of the top ten budget priorities this year and for the next few years. From the infrastructure perspective, the growth will remain as CAGR 19 per cent for Polycom and for its partners.

As I am focussing on manufacturing, all the manufacturers across the glob are trying to do one thing and that is to enhance decision-making for manufacturing and the collaboration tools from the companies like Polycom are helping them in that way. Collaboration means two or more persons in a company working together to achieve a common goal. But it is difficult to do when they are separated by distance. By reducing the distance barrier, we can create a high-performance workplace. And, this high- performance workplace enables fast decision-making, access to resources and information, as well as enhanced operational work flows. These work flows and access to information help the companies to be operationally more efficient. We have companies throughout the world, we have a global supply chain. We have partners on a distributed worldwide scale. So, the bottom line is that we have created distance barrier and to eliminate the distance barrier, collaboration tools and solutions come into play.

We have a global supply chain and partners on a worldwide scale to help the companies bridge the physical geographies with our solutions.

How are you positioning the products in the market?
Traditionally, Polycom is known as the provider of starfish phone or the triangle shape phone, of which Polycom has the market share leadership position. Polycom also has video conferencing solutions. What we are trying to do in India is that we are taking all the solutions – be it voice or vide–– combining them into a single solution so that it can help the manufacturers to achieve their goal and objectives. It is not about individual products of Polycom but about the combined products to create powerful solutions for the manufacturers.

Which countries are important for you?
Obviously, it is North America and Europe and in particular the US market is very important for us. But what we find these days is that a lot of emerging countries, especially in Asia, offer a huge opportunity to improve operational efficiency by using our solutions. Now to focus on the Asian countries, we are running an enterprise road show, covering countries like Hong Kong, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Australia and India. We are looking for evangelizing the collaboration solution, particularly in the manufacturing space. We are looking at various new countries, apart from the traditional markets. Polycom India has a very good presence here and is growing by 40 per cent year on year. We have officesÄ– both sales and services–– in eight of the top metro cities in India. We are trying to find ways and means to expand our sales force and widen the Polycom partners’ base. We are also looking at partnerships in India in terms of software and hardware space to create unique solution for the customers in India.

Are you the market leader?
Yes, we have the largest installation in Global 2000 companies, Fortune 500 companies, government agencies and service providers’ space. We have over 600 partners and offices throughout the world.

Which is the biggest market for you, apart from the US?
I think for us all markets are large. In other words, all markets offer a tremendous opportunity. In Asia, we see vast opportunity in the countries like China, Japan and India.

What is your strategy to bring out new technologies?
Polycom will continue to roll out a number of products to enhance our overall product offerings and create more value add for our partners. We have an R&D facility for voice solution in Hyderabad. We will continue to invest in R&D activities across the world to bring out state-of-the-art video and voice technologies. We will continue to stay ahead of the game when it comes to providing our partners and customers the leading collaborative solutions available in the market. Our focus will now be to take our solutions beyond government, medical and education.

What is the break-up of your business?
Most of our business comes from government, manufacturing and education. From the enterprise perspective, if I do prioritization, it is manufacturing, BFSI, oil & gas, energy, hospitality and retail.

How will you help the SMEs which are unable to afford the cost for your solutions?
We are tying up with service providers who can provide the collaboration solution as a service. It will enable SMEs not to invest upfront in technology, but to pay for the services as and when they require. So, it is a creative way of giving video conferencing in the hands of the customers through the service providers. We will start this very slowly, but going forward it will help us in focussing on the enterprise space. We are propagating the same in all our road shows.