Last October at its Strategy Day, Polycom announced that its RealPresence CloudAXIS suite was in beta. The software suite is an extension of the company's RealPresence platform and enables browser-based UC applications such as chat, presence and, of course, video. After what appears to be a successful six-month beta program, Polycom this week announced the general availability of CloudAXIS.
The GA version of CloudAXIS is a significant milestone for Polycom, as it gives the company a solid platform to take advantage of several market transitions and continually evolve Polycom to being more than a vendor that sells expensive room-based video systems. CEO Andy Miller regularly talks about the evolution of Polycom, and CloudAXIS is a good proof point. These transitions are:
* Pervasive video. The network effect, also known as Metcalf's Law, states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes on it. The more connected nodes, the more value. Historically, the video industry has had lots of nodes, but deployed in islands. CloudAXIS is designed to create universal access to corporate-grade video that allows organizations to deploy both B2B and B2C video, eliminating at least some of the "island" problem.
To use CloudAXIS, a worker simply needs to send colleagues a URL link, and anyone with a browser and camera can connect. This means workers with laptops, desktops, tablets or mobile devices can easily join a collaborative session.
* Visual conversations. I wrote a report on this topic that can be found at zkresearch.com, and Phil Edholm touched on this in a blog as well. The concept of visual conversations is that they create a single, visual environment for corporate collaboration.
In a sense, we've never really had truly unified communications. Rather we've had a series of single-purpose conferencing tools. One of the points I made in the Locknote at Enterprise Connect is that conferencing tools need to evolve into integrated-conversations applications, or truly "Unified" UC. CloudAXIS delivers many of the features that I discussed in my visual conversations report.
* Consumerization. The term consumerization has come to mean workers using consumer tools in the workplace. But does it have to mean that and only that, or is there another way to deliver consumerization?
CloudAXIS allows workers to import contacts from many of the consumer social tools such as Skype, Facebook and GoogleTalk, as well as corporate e-mail and directory. This gives workers the ability to reach the contacts they have in the consumer applications, but still be able to use the corporate tools. I believe the unified directory will be one of the biggest features that workers will like, as it gives them a single place to reach all of their contacts.
In addition to CloudAXIS, Polycom announced a new offering called Video SmartStart. This is an easy-to-deploy, fully-integrated, all-inclusive, pre-tested, turnkey solution to deliver CloudAXIS. These fully integrated, pretested solutions have become increasingly common (for example, Avaya Collaboration Pod), as it gives customers the ability get CloudAXIS up and running faster than trying to tie all the components together themselves. The Video SmartStart service also includes implementation and adoption services to complement the platform.
This is an important offering as it de-risks the deployment while ensuring high levels of quality and security. A SmartStart deployment can start with as few as 100 users, so even mid size organizations can adopt CloudAXIS.
Polycom offers CloudAXIS as both a capex purchase as well as a three-year opex lease. I don't believe there's a right answer when it comes to capex versus opex, but rather it comes down to the preference of the customer, so giving the customers choice is definitely the right thing for Polycom to do.
I would look at the current version of CloudAXIS as the start of the journey for Polycom. Obviously there's more to corporate collaboration than video, chat and presence, and I would expect to see an aggressive roadmap of features from Polycom for CloudAXIS.
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