Science & Technology
Science and Technology
Science and Technology
Tue, January 20, 2009 Polycom, Inc.: Polycom Solution Unifies Visual Communication Infrastructure to Help Enterprises Scale Video Services
PLEASANTON, CA--(Marketwire - January 20, 2009) - To support the increasing use of visual communication in business, Polycom, Inc. (
"The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals has a broad, statewide visual communication network that facilitates thousands of hours of telemedicine and distance learning applications each month. The technology brings expertise to where it is needed and has been a tremendous asset following hurricanes Katrina and Gustov," said Gene Guffy, video administrator for the Louisiana Dept. of Health and Hospitals. "Adding the DMA 7000 to our distributed video network, which includes eight bridges and more than 125 endpoints, significantly reduces help desk tasks associated with managing large-scale ad-hoc conferencing, which frees our time to tackle other projects. The DMA 7000 also ensures continuity of operations in the event of a natural disaster, power outage, equipment maintenance, etc. For example, if a bridge on one of our university campuses loses power, all audio and video calls using meetings rooms on that bridge are automatically routed to other resources on the network."
"The increasing use of video communication within businesses is impacting the scalability requirements of enterprise networks," said [ Roopam Jain ], principal analyst, conferencing and collaboration, Frost & Sullivan. "The Polycom DMA 7000 is uniquely designed to help large organizations spread ad-hoc video communication to thousands of users by improving the simplicity and reliability of the application, delivering scalability across a distributed network, and streamlining the management process to simplify deployment, administration and reduce costs."
Deployed on application servers, the DMA 7000 application manages and distributes video calls in a highly reliable and scalable method across multiple [ Polycom RMX 2000™ ] media servers, which are video conferencing "bridges" that join multiple sites in the same meeting, connect users on different networks and optimize the call experience between video endpoints with different capabilities. This distributed network design allows enterprises to connect and utilize main and branch office infrastructure systems together as part of a single, seamless solution. This distributed model delivers significant advantages over the alternative model for high-scale video applications, which is a single video appliance with high port capacity. The increased scale, reliability and resource efficiency gains will help drive video adoption by increasing availability to end users, while also alleviating administrative concerns currently preventing large growth. Advantages of the Polycom DMA 7000 include:
Cost-Effective Scalability -- The Polycom DMA 7000 solution allows organizations to scale their video services as needed by easily adding additional media server resources without impacting current services or requiring significant administrative work. Resources can be increased by adding additional RMX media servers, or by adding greater capacity modules to existing RMX media servers, increasing the virtual pool of ports available across an organization.
Improved Reliability and Fault Tolerance -- The DMA 7000 features intelligent routing capabilities that improve reliability by automatically routing calls in real time around network outages or oversubscribed or unavailable media servers. The distributed network design also provides redundancy with modular components and no single point of failure. The solution supports hot standby application server redundancy, database redundancy and synchronization, media server redundancy and geographical redundancy.
Simplified Video Network Administration -- The DMA 7000 streamlines many administrative tasks like provisioning, reporting and system maintenance and upgrades. Typically, an administrator would provision users for a specific media server and in the event of an outage or if use exceeded capacity, would need to re-provision users to another server. The Polycom solution eliminates that issue by supporting Active Directory integration, utilizing a common database and balancing call loads across all media server resources. Reporting is also streamlined through centralized collection of call details, logs, port utilization, etc. The DMA 7000 supports zero downtime upgrades, which can also lower costs by allowing administrators to conduct system maintenance, update software or upgrade equipment during normal business hours without impacting video services.
"Visual communication is becoming a mission-critical communication tool for many customers, which requires that video services be available for employees to use at any time," said Joe Sigrist, senior vice president and general manager of video solutions, Polycom. "The DMA 7000 solution supports [ desktop ], [ group ] and [ telepresence ] applications and makes it easier for customers to deploy on-demand video services broadly. It brings proven IP telephony practices to visual communication and leverages our experience in high-availability conferencing solutions for service provider networks to give enterprise customers carrier-class scalability, reliability and efficiency for delivering video services."
The Polycom DMA 7000 is the latest development advancing the [ Polycom VC2 vision ] of video as a pervasive component of unified communication in the enterprise -- enabling people to call anyone, anywhere, anytime from any device. In conjunction with its global network of certified partners, Polycom offers world-class services to help customers seamlessly integrate the DMA 7000 into their video network environment.
Additional Information:
Whitepaper -- Scalable Infrastructure for Distributed Video
Video Quote -- Roopam Jain, Frost & Sullivan
Pricing and Availability
Polycom DMA 7000 is now available worldwide with a recommended starting list price of US$69,000 (includes redundant DMA 7000 servers and software). Polycom solutions are available through certified Polycom channel partners.
About Polycom
Polycom, Inc. (
Polycom reserves the right to modify future product plans at any time. Products and/or related specifications referenced in this press release are not guaranteed, and will be delivered on a when and if available basis.
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