Business Info - Issue 140

businessinfomag.uk magazine 18 COLLABORATION In March 2019, nine months after completing its acquisition of Polycom, Plantronics announced that it was rebranding the $2 billion combined UC&C endpoint business as Poly. Naming the company after the Ancient Greek for ‘many’ sets the seal on an acquisition that always felt more like a merger of equals than a take-over (both companies are of a similar size, with the difference between Plantronics’ $850 million turnover and Polycom’s $1.1 billion due almost entirely to the latter’s services revenue). The union of the two companies, both specialists in the last metre of communication (3 metres in the case of video), has a certain logic, as developments in unified communications and collaboration meant that Plantronics, with its heritage in headsets and audio products for the contact centre and office environments, and Polycom, best known for its audio and videoconferencing solutions for the boardroom and office, were both gravitating towards the same middle ground. “Essentially, you have two companies that are experts in the field of endpoint technologies – Plantronics, with headsets and conference phones and Sitting pretty now acoustics management with Soundscape, and Polycom, with video systems, conference systems and desk phones. To meet demand from customers to collaborate in a different way, with more diversity of endpoint, Plantronics wanted to expand its speakerphone portfolio and desk devices and Polycom wanted to expand into personal communications and headsets, so the companies were starting to overlap,” explained Paul Clark, EMEA Managing Director of Poly. He added that bringing the two companies together under one brand will sharpen their focus on providing the best experience for users of Poly’s technologies at a time of significant change in the UC&C space. “Certain vendors will become the corporate standard for collaboration, for example Skype for Business, now moving to Microsoft Teams, but you will still have people in a company using Zoom or Webex, perhaps because that is what a supplier or partner wants. Even if the IT department says ‘We are only going to use Skype for Business in our organisation and nothing else’, the reality is that organisations will need to support different types of UC&C technology. Poly can help with the enablement of that. “At the end point level, we will make the end point work with whatever technology you want to use. You might be using a Microsoft camera and a Plantronics headset, and I might be calling you using Skype for Business or Webex; I don’t want to care about any of that. I just want to get on with the call. Our objective is to make sure that the device you are using – headset, desk phone, speakerphone, video – can connect to any call irrespective of the underlying technology or collaboration service.” Clark points out that this is a growing requirement, as changing working practices, such as home- working and more use of third spaces, have made the ability to collaborate with remote participants a requirement for small businesses as much as multi- national businesses with distributed sales teams around the globe. Coinciding with the greater reach and adoption of UC&C technologies, he suggests there has been a significant democratisation of the technology, which Poly addresses with its management software. “While the initial infrastructure may be managed by IT, device selection and even replacement has devolved down to the group or individual. That’s driven adoption. However, IT still needs some level of control over what is being used on the network, as a poor choice of endpoint results in a poor experience. One of the obligations of Poly as a vendor is to provide insight into the last few metres. Our management software enables IT to see what devices people are using and the quality of the connection, because that all feeds into the net promoter score of the UC&C technology,” he said. More choice To ensure that it meets all end user needs with devices that can be seen and managed by IT, Poly is continuing to diversify its product range, most recently with the introduction of noise-cancelling headsets that aid concentration in open plan offices and video endpoints for Huddle rooms. Huddle rooms have become a hugely popular feature of the modern office, Paul Clark, EMEA Managing Director of Poly, tells James Goulding why the company is well placed to be the end point vendor of choice for seamless collaboration Paul Clark