Wow. What a week. I can safely say that TEAM Polycom 2016 blew all expectations out of the water. It was a fantastic three days of learning and training. I have so many positive thoughts and feedback from the event hence putting pen to paper and sharing with you all.

One of the first things that struck me was the excitement and energy from all of the speakers and the 1,500 partners, sales team and analysts in attendance. We pretty much had a full house at every presentation and the expo hall was buzzing with everyone trying out our new solutions.

It was great to have the opportunity to catch up with the sales teams and partners and discuss in detail our plans for 2016. I would like to take the opportunity to thank our partners for their continued support and dedication and to congratulate those that won a Circle of Excellence Award.

The keynotes were fantastic and met with very positive feedback from our partners who have said we ‘have our swagger back’ and that we ‘killed it’ with our new portfolio of solutions. The strength of our partnership with Microsoft and the benefit that our joint solutions can bring to the customer and to the market were at the forefront of several sessions. As I have mentioned to you before, our relationship is at its strongest and remains a critical part of our strategy in EMEA. We have such a deep integration with them; we are starting to see our competitors trying to do similar things. We need to continue to preserve our customers’ experiences with solutions like Polycom® RealPresence Clariti™ and Polycom® RealConnect™.

The innovation keynote was simply astounding. It felt like Michael Frendo and Ashan Willy received more applause than President Obama during his State of the Union speech! The atmosphere was amazing. Following a recap of the great innovation we have bought to the market over the last year, Michael and Ashan introduced Polycom® RealPresence Clariti™. We have a fantastic opportunity with RealPresence Clariti™ – enabling us to target small and medium sized businesses with this easy to use solution, as well as including Cloud Burst capability, an industry first.

I have been waxing lyrical about value selling and listening to our customers. This is one of the key messages that was focused on during each of the presentations, with a customer example from SAP. We need to constantly engage with our existing customers to understand their business objectives and requirements. This is where we win — when we fundamentally understand what they need and how we can help them.

We have many opportunities in front of us to enable us to Change the Game in 2016. Our new solutions, our strong relationship with Microsoft and our continued investment in innovation to name a few, so let’s get started!