Information Systems Management

Milestones 3...

Business Practices

Both organizations, Polycom and Microsoft, focus on increasing productivity, reduce cost, and connect geographically dispersed teams trough unified communication (UC) to achieve business objectives. The integration of Polycom solutions and Microsoft UC platform in a business environment becomes a frequent requirement because of previous investments many organizations have made in both solutions. These two organizations revolutionize the way people conduct business through the most effective, personalized and extensive interactions enabled by comprehensive UC and video conference solutions that enable them to connect anytime regardless their location network.

For the integration of Polycom video conference solution and Microsoft LYNC, no gateways required for deploy them, which makes simple to manage and use. Polycom offers a comprehensive and fully interoperable HD voice and video solutions for the Microsoft UC platform, which consist of Microsoft LYNC, Microsoft Exchange server, and Microsoft SharePoint server.

CDW emphasized that Interoperability is one the key factor that facilitates unified communication and collaboration. With the technological benefits of Microsoft and and Polycom solutions, employees and customers can ensure effective communication and coordination using familiar applications, adding rich voice and video to IM, email to calendar and more. Both company solutions support system-wide secure authentication and media encryption, protecting the integrity of calls inside and outside of a network. Microsoft Active directory solution will provide employees access to corporate directory across Microsoft applications and Polycom solutions in the interest to reduce time and effort when deploying and managing communications.

One the key benefits that that Microsoft LYNC offers is the Worldwide LYNC Federation Directory which is service that facilitates cross-organization communications. Thus, employees are allowed to add their own customers' contact, those who work for organization the federated LYNC deployments, without IT assistant, to discuss business needs. Moreover, employees would able to easily initiate video calls, instant messaging (IM), and share contents to discuss future business needs.

Recommendation

Unified communications and video conference technology is all about making better use of the latest technological advances in communications technology in the effort to increase collaboration among employees, customers and partners; and improve business responsiveness while reducing the overall cost of business processes. The demand for these solutions is steadily growing in the telecommunication industry.

Garner, Inc., and IT research and advisory company, noted in an article that the the global unified communications and collaboration market reached $7.4 billion in 2010, and Forrester Research predicts the market will increase to more than $14.5 billion within the next five years. Thus, many organizations are aggressively investing unified communication and video conference technology to achieve business advantage. Considering those eventualities and the aggressive demand for the unified communication and video conference technology, I would recommend large and start-up organizations to take advantage of these technologies so they could break down the barriers that prevent them from attaining their business values.