The Hindu Business Line : Take a virtual trip

FROM creating virtual boardrooms to networking a remotely-located telemedicine centre in the rural heartlands, or for communicating in a dispersed defence network environment, technology has brought about a sea change in the way one communicates. And the virtual interface is gaining ground even as it saves on communication costs.

According to Dayana Poller, Region Vice-President, Asia-Pacific, of the US-based Polycom Inc, defence, healthcare, education and e-governance applications are seeing rapid growth. And there is immense scope for growth under each of these. For instance, the defence vertical includes a whole range of sub-applications such as police, military and the fire department are included. The Nasdaq-listed Polycom, which is a video, voice, Web conferencing and collaboration solutions provider, sees India emerging as an important market for conferencing applications.

Polycom has lined up advancements in its personal conferencing solutions to redefine how individuals use conferencing technology at the desktop level, says Dayana. These enable distance communications that are as natural and interactive as one being there. With the acquisition of PictureTel, Polycom has further consolidated its multi-conferencing business. The company has also partnered with industry players such as Tatas, Siemens, and Godrej to reach out its solutions. In the Indian context, for which Dayana is in-charge, there are three distinct areas where there is potential for rapid growth. These are the Government as a vertical, covering both Centre and States in terms of e-governance and administration, the education sector, particularly in the universities, and healthcare. In healthcare, the technology can make a big difference to telemedicine applications. Polycom says it has alsolined up a Web collaboration software into a full-featured personal conferencing portal. This will provide users with a single interface for all of their conferencing needs, from instant messaging and voice, video, data and Web conferencing. ViaVideo II delivers, the company says, enhanced video quality to the desktop or laptop PC and lick-to-add video conferencing integration through the Polycom WebOffice conferencing portal.

At its core, Polycom WebOffice is a Web-based collaboration solution that enables users to share data and communicate in real time, says the company. With the release of its 5.0 software, Polycom says it has expanded WebOffice to be a full-featured conferencing portal. This has been designed to provide users with a single interface and environment for all of their conferencing needs.

Each user has his own office which provides him with an individual, unchanging URL for Web-based meetings. Upon entering their WebOffice, users are presented with WebOffice Manager, which displays the `buddy' list and provides simple buttons for either instant messaging, or launching a voice, video or Web conference or even a combination of these elements. All of the controls users need to manage their data, audio and video conference are integrated into the WebOffice window, including the video display.

According to Polycom, starting a conference is as easy as clicking a button. To invite others to the meeting, the user simply selects participants from the buddy list or provides the personal URL to meeting participants, who can access the user's WebOffice through any Web browser. Once in a collaboration session, the WebOffice owner can present documents, share applications, use white-boarding capabilities or instantly launch an audio and or video conference. The WebOffice owner can encrypt documents, limit the number of participants, and add or remove participants at any time.

WebOffice detects whether a user is video-enabled with a Polycom ViaVideo or ViaVideo II video conferencing system. If so, when the WebOffice owner launches a video call, the system will seamlessly connect those participants who are video-enabled and provide an instant dial-in number for other participants, says the company.

With WebOffice and the expansion to a personal conferencing portal, Polycom is the first to deliver what users have been asking for — easy, on-demand access to conferencing and collaboration tools through a single, easy-to-use integrated interface, says the company.

Launching a conference is instantaneous and extremely simple, yet the collaboration capabilities are powerful and the applications are limitless, it says.

The technology, Polycom says, is backed by a new camera technology that provides exceptional video quality, even in difficult lighting conditions often experienced at desktops and in remote office locations. This handles low light, bright light and heavy backlight situations. It delivers true-to-life colours and sharp images for effective desktop video communications and supports 11 different languages for global use, says the company.

vrishi@thehindu.co.in

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