Customers are getting sick of systems that don’t work properly together. As a result, products like Polycom’s RealConnect for Office 365 are making their way onto the market. These products aim at simplifying communications so that voice and video solutions can easily integrate with one another, rather than forcing customers to pay integrators to get them to work together after purchase.
Eric Steimel, Director of Real Estate Technology and Collaboration for Pitney Bowes, knows the hassle of connecting systems all too well. Many employees at Pitney Bowes enjoy an active, flexible working culture. That means meetings often take place outside of the office, in various platforms for voice and video conferencing.
Eric needed to find a solution that could auto-link the existing voice and video systems into a Skype for Business call. He found a solution in the new Polycom RealConnect for Office 365, which allows participants to bring Skype for Business and non-Skype for Business endpoints together into one meeting.
In a recent interview with The WorkSpace Today, Eric spoke about his experience with Polycom RealConnect for Office 365, after receiving a pre-launch preview of the solution at Pitney Bowes. Below is the Q&A in full:
How did you come to know about RealConnect for Office 365?
ES: Our original videoconferencing experience was challenging, because remote workers had video the size of a postage stamp- but they still used it. One day, we upgraded our infrastructure and the system failed. It surprised us how much people missed being able to connect different platforms in the same meeting.
So much has changed since then. With Skype for Business, our experience has improved dramatically. Our culture is more agile than ever with distributed teams all over. They’re in remote offices, in the field or at home. You never know where people will be or which device they will be using. As a result, it’s difficult to schedule and have meetings that work for everyone.
RealConnect for Office 365 is exactly what we needed. Instead of people spending time at the beginning of each meeting trying to get the technology to work, they now just join from wherever, from whatever platform they’re comfortable with and focus on the meeting. Our vision is that every meeting is a Skype for Business meeting. This makes it easy to both schedule as well as join a meeting. It saves time in each meeting, especially during new employee training. It’s just easy having everything and everyone under one roof, technologically.
If you didn’t have this type of technology, how would Pitney Bowes work?
ES: Because it’s a cloud solution, the RealConnect for Office 365 is a good fit for us. The biggest draw is I don’t have to deploy anything on-premise to make it work. No on-premise infrastructure, no need to build servers and appliances. This facilitates the deployment. I manage RealConnect for Office 365 the same way I manage everything else in Office 365 – I can introduce it and scale easily and confidently.
What does it mean to you that this has been created by Polycom and Microsoft:
ES: The world has become much more interconnected in terms of these solutions working together. To me, it’s important that the vendors I work with work closely with each other. It’s important to me to have a solution that’s embraced by both Polycom and Microsoft. If there are challenges, they’re more likely to be fixed, and it just works seamlessly. Having the tight integration in the Office 365 portal allows us to more easily deliver a service to our internal customers. Employees don’t care about the underlying technology. All they care about is that when they come into a meeting, it works. It’s just easy, so they can focus on collaborating with their peers.
How has the experience been so far?
ES: We have many work groups at Pitney Bowes. Teams that use video find their remote participants have a more engaging experience. They can see facial expressions and feel more a part of the conversation. Body language is a big way we communicate and visual cues improve collaboration.
What would you say the ROI has been using RealConnect for O365
ES: Improved meeting effectiveness. Starting a meeting is a snap – no wasted time struggling to get the technology sorted out at the beginning of a meeting. Training a new employee is easy. Being able to have one click of a button to bring everyone together in one meeting is really a great experience.
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Excellent article. Polycom is a leader in video conferencing technology. Additionally, vendors such as R-HUB also offer video conferencing solutions like R-HUB HD video conferencing servers for conducting online video conferences.