Business travelers are among the heaviest users of mobile communications, and yet some carriers are actually encouraging enterprise customers to cut their business travel budgets. That’s because service providers know that helping customers save money is the key to winning business today, and video conferencing can do that.
British telecommunications giant BT offers video conferencing and collaboration to its customers through the Polycom RealPresence Platform. The platform enables face-to-face collaboration across multiple platforms and devices, meaning that users of iOS and Android devices can work together.
For Polycom (PLCM), device interoperability is a cornerstone of its strategy to compete with Apple and Google, as the two titans eye video conferencing as a lucrative extension of their operating systems. Gary Testa, VP of Polycom’s global cloud and service provider solution group, says his company’s quality of service is clearly superior to that of “over-the-top” providers like Google and Skype.
Testa says “software as a serivce” (SAAS) is emerging as a key revenue source for carriers, and Polycom is ready to be part of that initiative. He says there are two revenue models for carriers. Some sell their customers “end points,” which could range from software such as an iPhone app to a fully configured telepresence room. These carriers then charge the customers for the video conferencing service, by the minute or by the data package. Other carriers choose to give their customers the end points, along with a contract for monthly service. Either way, says Testa, “the end points are invisible to the user. All the complexity is hidden in the network… the core of value is in the cloud.”
Polycom, a $1.5 billion dollar company with about 3,800 employees, is fully focused on software as a service even if it does not involve video. Later this summer, the company plans to offer its customers chat and voice-over-IP for Apple and Android devices.
Polycom CEO Andy Miller (pictured at right) delivered one of the keynotes this week at TIA in Dallas, and Gary Testa spoke later with RCR about videoconferencing on smartphones.
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