Office 365 is the new kid on the block: Polycom-Microsoft partnership at WPC 2016

[timbritt]

23,645 steps counted, 19 coffees consumed and with a brain that has hit its maximum capacity with giga bits of new data, I think I need some cloud storage of my own to manage this influx of ideas. Welcome to Microsoft WPC 2016!

Day one kicked off with the opening keynote from Satya Nadella. He explained the vision, the future and the simplicity of the transformational journey that we are about to embark on with the launch of Office 365 and which is something that every organisation needs. Nadella said, “Every business is a digital business and their digital transformation journey starts now. The question to ask is how do we as a vendor or you as a partner develop and deploy key applications to support this journey? Clients aren’t interested in hardware they need solutions for their business workflows. We need to create, build and reinvent our solutions to support their digital transformation.” 

As a long-standing partner of Microsoft, Polycom has done just that in the recent past – we launched Polycom® RealPresence Clariti™. It is our new collaboration infrastructure software which delivers Polycom’s powerful HD voice, content, video and web collaboration to businesses of any size. Deployable on-premises, in a private hosted cloud or through a partner-hosted service, the RealPresence Clariti solution allows customers, including small and mid-sized businesses, to connect and experience the power of enterprise-grade visual collaboration. The solution has already seen great success as it provides the open standards-based interoperability with the rest of the Unified Communications industry and compatibility with Skype for Business platform. Unified Communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) has evolved and is empowering the partner community to add real value to their customers’ digital transformation.

The atmosphere here at WPC 2016 is simply amazing! It’s great to see the existing and potential partners, who otherwise compete on a daily basis, arriving at an event and brainstorming what the industry really needs to innovate further. I’ve managed to catch up with old friends, added lots of new contacts to my list and extended my professional network many folds.

Here are the main highlights for Polycom partners from this year’s show (so far!):

• Surface Tablet – The launch of Office 365 presents a great opportunity for Polycom partners to position Polycom® RealPresence Clarti™, a solution attractively priced in a simple per-user, per-year model, making it easy to budget today and in the future.
• Project Rigel – Polycom partners have the opportunity to target 97% of the untapped business as there are approximately 60 million conference rooms in the world but only a few are video capable as of now.
• Skype for Business – The popularity of this enterprise communications tool is growing leaps and bounds. Approximately 3 billion calls are made daily and about 56% of all online meetings are held here.

So to close off, Microsoft collaboration is in full force here at WPC 2016 and we would very much like to meet you if you are around. We invite you to be a Polycom partner so you can start your journey to become the trusted advisor to your clients. Please get in touch with our channel management team or leave a comment here so we can be in touch. If you succeed, we succeed – we can help you further your Unified Collaboration business.

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