What’s on your hit list right now for the Central and Eastern Europe?

My primary focus is to ensure we are reaching out to new customers and partners as well continue to help the existing ones. We are challenging ourselves a little more this year and we are ready to put in the hard work to implement the strategy that we call ‘net new’ to meet our objectives. We are focusing on helping customers and partners truly understand the business value of Polycom solutions by thoroughly investigating their business objectives and requirements. This will enable us to understand what they really need and how Polycom can help them achieve that.

We are exhibiting a range of new solutions during the annual international conference CeBIT** in Hannover, Germany, on 14-18 March 2016 at stand C57 and C58 in Hall 13 together with partners ALLNET and Microsoft. For the first time we are able to offer to our customers a depth of new solutions, regardless of business size, sector or budget, and we can demonstrate many of our new solutions at the show. Our relationship with Microsoft is at its strongest and remains a critical part of our strategy in EMEA. It’s a key differentiator for us in attracting new customers and expanding our partner base hence our continued development of solutions for this market, such as being the first to market with our Polycom® VVX® Business Media Phones voice solutions for Microsoft’s Office 365 Cloud PBX. This solution is also available for demonstrations at CeBIT.

What are you seeing in the Central and Eastern European market, and how are you capitalising on these opportunities?

There are continued signs of growth in our market as businesses have started investing in technology again, and high on their agendas is how they can make their workplace a better environment for employees and customers to collaborate together. We have started working even more closely with our customers and partners to identify what they are looking for. Interest in room-based systems has wavered over the last couple of years due to several contributing factors, such as increase in mobility, mobile and tablet device usage, flexible working and remote working. We are now starting to see these room systems become more popular again, in particular ‘huddle room’ solutions. Our new centre of the room solutions, such as the   Polycom® RealPresence Trio™ and RealPresence Centro™ can perfectly cater for this demand.

In addition, specifically in Germany, there is an untapped potential in the Mittelstand or the middle sector where flexible working is already on the rise. Generally speaking, across the German market, at least 30% of the middle sector companies are found to be encouraging their employees to work from anywhere, on any device. This figure, according to a new research, is higher than the global average of 29%.

In order to benefit from these new trends, we have made further investments in the business, including several new hires across Central and Eastern Europe to strengthen our presence in the region.

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** Polycom is exhibiting at CeBIT stand C57 and C58 in Hall 13 with partners ALLNET and Microsoft on 14-18 March 2016 in Hannover, Germany. Polycom's CeBIT 2016 social media competition #ShowMeTrio requires the CeBIT attendees to drop-by at Polycom's stand located at the venue and register for the competition. Terms and conditions apply. More details are available on request and here: https://bit.ly/1pbOaDW