What is on your hit list for 2016?

My top priority for 2016 is, as always, driving profitable growth through nurturing our existing customers and implementing the strategy we call ‘net new’. Net new for us means new customers, channels and incremental channels, products and services to help us to continue to grow and expand our business. Continuously engaging with our existing customers to understand their business objectives and requirements is an absolute priority for me and the team. This is where we win — when we fundamentally understand what they need and how we can help them, to support their journey of growth and expansion.

Our new solutions will provide us with great opportunities this year. The depth of our portfolio makes us even more compelling to potential and existing customers; we are able to offer a breadth of solutions, regardless of business size, sector or budget. This enables us to grow opportunities for our channel partners too.

And, it goes without saying that the other opportunity we have is our partnership with Microsoft; our relationship 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 new Office 365 PBX.

What are you seeing in the UK&I market, and how are you capitalising on these opportunities?

The UK&I continues to grow with the new government in place and in Q4 the budgets announcement meant businesses started investing in technology again. High on the agenda is how they can make the workplace a better environment for employees and customers to communicate and collaborate together. 

We are now starting to see an overwhelming response to room or ‘huddle’ systems, they are becoming popular again and with the introduction of solutions like Polycom® RealPresence Trio™, RealPresence Debut™ and RealPresence Medialign™ we can cater to this demand. 

What are you seeing in the Benelux market, and how are you capitalising on these opportunities?

There is a big appetite for flexible and mobile working in the Benelux and video-as-a-service is becoming more widely used.  Customers are looking for easy to install "room-based" videoconferencing solutions, so we expect our solutions, as mentioned above, will support customers and enable seamless, collaborative working from any workspace. 

We also have an established relationship with The Social Enterprise Society Platform, which is made up of Dutch UC companies that are aiming to help businesses in The Netherlands use Skype for Business more effectively. This means we can continue to be a part of the Microsoft ecosystem, creating great momentum for Polycom and our solutions can continue to support the workplace of the future.

Skype for Business is driving enterprise value and is in high demand, subsequently driving the demand for enterprise-grade hardware solutions. The seamless integration that we offer with Microsoft Skype for Business and Office365 makes Polycom the clear choice.

I can safely say that in the UK&I and the Benelux, the workplace of the future is already here. Video collaboration is becoming more and more pervasive, people in coffee shops on video conferences, people on trains, airports…the list is endless. This was unimaginable three years ago and brings many opportunities for Polycom.  2016 is all about growth so we can continue to build the workplace of the future.