Polycom is looking to storm the telepresence market with the launch of its own telepresence system, the Polycom RealPresence Experience (RPX).
While Hewlett-Packard (HP) launched its Halo Collaboration Studio in 2005, it was not until October last year when Cisco unveiled its Cisco TelePresence Meeting system that the term telepresence caught on.
Many market watchers argue that telepresence is just a glorified version of videoconferencing (VC), but Tony Heyworth, Polycom’s director of marketing for EMEA, disagreed.
“Telepresence feels more natural than VC,” he said. “It is about creating a ‘same room’ meeting experience where remote participants are life-like in size, sound and visual clarity.”
Polycom is looking for VARs to become certified to sell its RPX high-definition (HD) system, which consists of eight or 16ft HD cinematic screens, Siren 22kHz stereo surround HD sound and EyeConnect technology that puts the camera at eye level for natural face-to-face interaction.
“We have added an element to the Polycom partner programme to enable resellers to become certified in the RPX,” Heyworth added. “We are looking for some partners to provide a special focus and invest in this with us. For example, by installing a RPX demo room at their own offices.”
Last month, rival VC vendor Tandberg announced an alliance with HP to make their respective telepresence and VC portfolios interoperable.
Paul Gullett, Tandberg’s EMEA vice president, said: “We are about to launch a similar telepresence product to Polycom’s called Tandberg Experia. Cisco and HP have made a lot of announcements around telepresence, but both Tandberg’s and Polycom’s differentiator is that our systems can interoperate with other VC and telepresence systems.”
Heyworth agreed: “The RPX is designed to work with all other vendors’ systems irrespective of size. We can talk to someone on a desktop VC system or another telepresence room using the RPX.”
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