Technology Reseller v36

01732 759725 VIDEO COMMUNICATIONS 40 meeting rooms,” said Fluester. “They are in their bedrooms, their lounges, their kitchens. “We decided to take all our experience in premium, high-end, professional- grade office solutions – our immersive telepresence solutions, our big meeting room cameras and sound systems, all the artificial intelligence we have around noise suppression and the tracking and framing of cameras – and distil that down into devices for personal spaces at home and in the office.” This is not just a question of providing high quality hardware. Poly realised it was equally important for these solutions to be: n easy to distribute to remote workers, with direct delivery from distribution partners to employees’ home addresses; n simple for non-technical users to set up and use; n delivered with a cloud management tool giving visibility and control over remote systems for improved manageability and health and safety/compliance; n wrapped up with a service agreement with 3-year hardware replacement, cloud management software updates and 24/7 video helpdesk support. Management and control “Employers, IT teams and HR need visibility over workers who are no longer sitting at a desk in the office, to make sure they are taking enough breaks away from the screen, that the equipment is working correctly and that they are not being exposed to too much audio from a health and safety point of view,” said Fluester. “They also need to support them from a network point of view. When workers are at a desk on the office network with QoS and SLAs, IT knows the network is going to Ready for your close-up? Poly has responded to the Work from Home trend with the launch of a new series of personal conferencing products, backed up with remote management and 24/7 video support There are two schools of thought when it comes to video communications. The first is that the novelty and speedy implementation of Work from Home initiatives last March has made people more tolerant of fuzzy video quality, noises off, inappropriate muting/ unmuting, poor lighting etc.. The second is that in Lockdown 3 there can be no excuse for such practices and that by now we should have learnt how to project a professional image with high quality video and crisp audio. No prizes for guessing where Poly stands. As Neil Fluester, Senior Product Manager at the conferencing specialist, said: “In the first lockdown there was a lot of tolerance. Whatever you had was OK; you could get away with a lot more. But I have heard from several people recently that in this new lockdown things are getting a lot more serious. This is the new norm and good enough is no longer acceptable.” Even after lockdown restrictions are lifted, it is likely that one third of employees will continue to work from home either part- time or full-time, and to do so effectively and productively they will need a working set-up that supports business-quality video communications. Designed for home workers Poly identified that home workers were poorly served by existing solutions and so last year it set about developing a new range of products specially designed to meet the needs of remote workers and their employers. “Poly has had great success in the office space, but many of the users that consume Poly equipment are no longer in large work, the firewall is going to work and that there is enough bandwidth for video. That is more challenging when people are at home, on their BT or Virgin broadband. So, it is essential to have visibility into home networks and home set-ups to be able to support remote workers.” Poly Lens Desktop management software provided through a Poly+ service and management subscription, which also includes 3-year hardware replacement for devices and 24/7 live video helpdesk support, offers two-way communication between the remote worker’s PC and the IT department, enabling IT to manage remote devices and provide home workers with an appropriate level of support. “What’s really powerful is that IT can look at my network. If I am having problems with my video, I can run a test and the results will be sent back to IT so they can see my network latency, the bandwidth I have available to me; they can see how many network hops I am going over at Virgin or BT; they can look at my CPU usage, the memory usage on my device. When I am having problems with my video systems, rather than saying try turning it off and on again, IT can provide a level of remote diagnostics to help me,” explained Fluester. “What’s also powerful is that HR and the employer can set up compliance for me as a home user, programming things like hydration reminders to remind me to have a drink every 30 minutes or to take a break away from my screen or to take a break away from my desk. We have added in some best practices, telling home users how to set up their headset, how to mount and centre their camera, how to get the best lighting for their camera or the best background. There are also some ergonomic settings. We can limit the amount of noise people are exposed to through their headset, so they don’t damage their hearing.” This capability, suggests Fluester, elevates the Poly Studio P Series from a set Poly Studio P5 Poly Studio P15 Poly Studio P21

RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUxNDM=