A number of multinational corporations want to be seen as contributors to Make In India, Skill India and Digital India programmes. The $2-billion Polycom has, over many months, stated its intention to support some of the government’s key initiatives. The company develops video and collaborative communication technologies for businesses worldwide. During a recent visit to India, Jeffrey Rodman, Co-founder and Chief Evangelist, Polycom, spoke to BusinessLine about the Unified Communications brand’s plans around Digital India. Rodman also outlined the way he feels workplaces of the future will shape up. Excerpts:

How does Polycom engage with the government on Digital India?

Polycom intends to play a big role in digitisation of the Indian economy through government initiatives such as Digital India, Skill India and e-governance. Digitisation opens up abundant opportunities for Polycom — technologies such as mobility, cloud and social media have a huge impact on video conferencing and collaboration. Users prefer to see the person and work with them without the distance barrier. Video and visual collaboration makes this entire experience enriching, and productive... With respect to e-governance, Polycom’s technology is helping different government departments collaborate in a timely manner, helping digitise and automate the entire processes of governance.

What other sectors have relevance for Polycom in India?

Our advanced collaborative solutions help address challenges that the education sector faces such as improving educational access for students, providing education equity and affordability, enabling better learning experiences, remaining competitive and generating revenue. We can bring content providers together, enable borderless education as well as provide applications that reduce administrative costs and improve staff productivity through the power of collaborative technology.

How will Polycom meet the demand that arises from changing workplaces?

As more people get access to collaborative technologies at work, there is an increased end user expectation that collaboration tools should be as easy and intuitive to use as smartphones or tablets. People also expect to be able work in the same way across any device, in any room and as they move from a desk to a meeting room. Polycom understands this... developing total solutions that drive user adoption and are designed for simplicity and anywhere, anytime collaboration. We are also working to educate users on how to make themselves more effective in these workspaces with whatever technology they have.

How should employer organisations ideally prepare for this ‘collaborative’ future of work?

Employees are seeking out employers who empower them to achieve maximum efficiency. This means creating an experience of autonomy where employees can choose the technologies that best suit them and their role, because in the workplace of the future, they want to work smarter, not longer.

Co-working spaces, crowd funding, and the hiring of freelancers have also become increasingly commonplace. Organisations will need to ensure contract workers and office-based employees have same ability to meet and collaborate, regardless of location, to get the job done.

Both large enterprises and start-ups in India want to strategically serve the 40 million-odd SMBs here. How will Polycom stay relevant to this segment?

Our biggest growth in India has come from the SMB segment as we see a lot of first-time users adopting collaboration solutions, to reap the business benefits of the technology. Our key achievements in India have been to grow the collaboration market by creating competitive and innovative solutions that address our customers’ requirements and cater to emerging trends in the market. We continue to break down barriers that have prevented SMBs from taking advantage of business-grade video conferencing solutions. We are committed to driving SMB-specific innovation... to create solutions that are powerful, affordable and easy to use.

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