Business Info - Issue 140

COLLABORATION 01732 759725 magazine 19 but, according to Clark, few businesses are making the most of them, which is why Poly has introduced the Polycom Studio plug and play video bar. “There are reckoned to be just over 30 million Huddle rooms today, only 2% of which are video-enabled. That is forecast to increase 7X in the next two years, so there is a very, very big growth forecast in video enablement,” he said. Clark says there are two reasons for this: one is the growing affordability of video-enabling small and medium-sized Huddle rooms – “The Studio video and sound bar we launched at the beginning of the year costs £600-£700 ex VAT, so is not expensive,” he said; the other is greater awareness of the extent to which video enhances the effectiveness of collaboration. “When you talk on the telephone, 13% of the value of the interaction comes from the words and 87% from the tone of voice. If you then introduce video, the dynamics change completely. The value of the words drops to 7% and the tone of voice to 38%, with body language contributing 55% of the value. The more people use Huddle rooms, the more they will see how empowering video is. That growth in video is unlikely to stop; once it starts, it will feed itself,” he said. Services opportunities Another way in which Poly plans to help end users manage the challenges of the modern workplace is by developing services to complement Poly’s hardware offering. “There’s a lot of change in the marketplace, like moving from Microsoft Skype for Business to Teams, which is a cloud solution. Companies are looking for help in how to go there. Some of that will come from Microsoft, but we can help, too, on the endpoint side. Polycom has a strong heritage of doing that and had a significant services business, but Plantronics never did, and services is quite a challenge if you are not used to doing it – how do you revenue-recognise things, how do you price them, how do you deliver them, what’s the support organisation? Now, with the coming together of the two companies, we have all that expertise and knowledge from Polycom, and there are things we will be able to do that we are quite excited by.We can see huge opportunities for the combined company to deliver new services,” he said. Biophiliac design One existing Poly product with a service element is the Habitat Soundscaping solution originally developed by Plantronics as part of its exploration of new ways of working and the challenges of working in open plan offices. “In our UK offices we had a system of injecting Gaussian noise – pink or brown noise – to cover distracting sounds, such as someone talking 10 feet away. This was quite effective, but tiring as people were still hearing noise. We looked at what else we could do and discovered that natural sounds are comforting in an office environment, especially wind noise and water noise as they are constant and effective at covering chatter. “However, with this there was a disconnect between what people were hearing and what their mind expected to see, so we started exploring whether this could be balanced out by installing water features in an office.We found that if people can hear water and see water, they feel calmer, fatigue goes down and productivity remains high. That’s the principle behind Habitat Soundscaping – noise masking, but with natural sounds,” he said. This solution is already being used by companies around the world to address the problem of noise in open plan offices. As well as creating a better working environment for employees, it has enabled businesses to save money by increasing occupancy levels without impacting productivity. The solution combines hardware – sensors, speakers, physical water features and digital waterfalls – with a cloud-connected service, sold on a licence basis, which provides the software algorithms that dynamically adjust noise levels in line with changing levels of background noise. Poly might be a new name, but the breadth of its product portfolio and the ongoing expansion of its services offering at a time of rapid growth in unified communication and collaboration mean it is one with which end user organisations are likely to become increasingly familiar. www.poly.com The problem of Noise Three out of four office workers are regularly distracted by noise in the office, with 36% of 5,000 workers surveyed by Poly complaining that it causes them to lose at least an hour of work every day. The Top 10 noisy distractions are: 1. Co-worker talking loudly on the phone (76%) 2. Co-worker speaking on a phone nearby (65%) 3. Phone rings or alerts (61%) 4. Office celebrations (57%) 5. Nearby group meetings (55%) 6. Visiting children (53%) 7. Games being played in the office (52%) 8. Table and video games (49%) 9. Visiting family members (49%) 10. Outdoor sound s (42%)