On Monday morning, Polycom invited a few hundred of their closest friends to New York to open the NASDAQ stock market. Then, they revealed a new set of products demonstrating their commitment to put video into the routine of daily working life for information workers.  I was one of those friends who had the unique opportunity to (as the CIO of one of Polycom's customer’s quipped) “make my job relevant to my teenage children,” by having my face on the widescreen in Times Square.  But my kids don’t read my blog, so the important thing for the readers is taking a look at what Polycom said, and what it means.

Polycom discussed four themes through the day – their commitment to:

• Deliver a superior user experience. A new UI design and the promise to deliver that UI to all their products, enabling more intuitive and consistent access to all Polycom communications capabilities – in rooms, on PCs, and even from smartphones and tablets. The new UI looks slick and the ability to use that, or a Microsoft Lync client, to access the broad range of Polycom services is a major step in delivering a useful and usable collaboration tool.  The promise to deliver the UI as a software upgrade means that even existing Polycom customers will be able to enjoy the experience. Having recently visited Polycom's experience center at their new headquarters in San Jose, I will vouch for the intuitive, personal feeling of working a pure "new Polycom" environment.

I’ve spent the past two days with about 2,000 new friends. Polycom’s annual sales conference provided a drumbeat of messages about what is to come from the vendor. As Kate Hutchison, Polycom’s chief marketing officer, talked about the future, you could feel the certainty of an organization that has set its mind to a task. I sensed a certain swagger from everyone with whom I interacted that echoed Kate’s desire to see the company push the limits of human collaboration at work. CEO Andy Miller left no doubt that the company was committed, describing the unalterable market forces that have shaped his vision for the company and letting everyone in the room know that he intended to assemble a rogue’s gallery of industry goliaths to drive Polycom forward — inviting Dreamworks, HP, IBM, and Microsoft to contribute to his keynote address to hammer home this point. Sue Hayden, VP of global alliances and programs, has been charged with making this so — and, based on my conversations with her about companies from Apple to Motorola to Siemens, she will.

Polycom is committed to five things moving forward: being easier to work with, being easier to use, being more innovative, assembling more complete business solutions, and pursuing the business models their customers prefer. The values that Polycom put forth include:

• Being easier to do business with. Polycom is simplifying the process for buyers — working to make ordering products and services easier. There is now a tool for systems managers to enable zero-touch configuration. The company’s commitment to channels and end users was on display all week.

Avaya announced its intention and agreement to purchase Radvision today. These two technological powerhouses have the combined brainpower to put together some of the most advanced unified communications solutions in the world. Radvision’s experience in building complex modular communication components plus Avaya’s strength in delivering complete, reliable communications solutions is an appealing combination. The strengths of this combination include:

• Breadth of open technologies. Radvision’s H.323 and SIP stacks will combine neatly with Avaya’s Aura architecture to enable a wide range of interoperable communications solutions from varying vendors built on multiple old and new technologies.
• Video portfolio. Radvision’s Scopia videoconferencing portfolio (from  desktop to telepresence) extends Avaya’s current partner-driven video endpoint model.
• The cloud. Radvision’s service provider relationships gives Avaya a firmer footing from which to sell cloud solutions to service providers.

Issues that management will have to deal with in the combined company:

• Cultural fit. Avaya’s consensus-driven and collaborative culture may not provide the direction Radvision’s developers got used to within Radvision’s traditional command and control structure.
• Revenue growth. Radvision has been on a slide. The Avaya/Radvision combination will have to open new markets and increase win rates to pay back the $230 million purchase price — approximately three times Radvision’s annual revenue.

Cloud is the latest buzz in the IT market, and we at Forrester have covered this quite extensively. As I reflect on 2011, this is a theme that has also played prominently in many collaboration vendor discussions — because it is a fundamentally better business model to deliver collaboration technology to users. Faster version cycle times, simplified management of deployed software, reduced TCO of a shared pool of cloud resources, and serving information workers directly are just some of the varied benefits for users, buyers, and vendors. The direct connection to end users is a key to accelerating adoption in the collaboration and growing social markets.

At their Collaboration Summit, Cisco affirmed their commitment to delivering cloud services. They described Cisco WebEx (web conferencing and meeting) and Cisco CallWay (video conferencing) as part of the Cisco Collaboration Cloud — and having used both of these, I can say with certainty that they are usable, simple, and appealing.

I believe that Cisco’s secret to success will be their robust channels approach. Richard McLeod, senior director handling worldwide channels for collaboration sales, runs programs for traditional channel partners helping to install and run collaboration solutions on premise. Others at Cisco, such as Amanda Jobbins, VP global partner marketing, spend a lot of their time thinking about service providers as channels and how Cisco can help them succeed. These leaders look for products Cisco has designed to deliver collaboration capable clouds — and is working to advance the adoption of them — for example:

• Cisco VideoScape — a new video networking solution allowing combinations of video and collaboration content from multiple sources and to be delivered to multiple endpoints.

Two weeks ago, I used this blog to talk about videoconferencing solutions being deployed on portable platforms, namely tablets like the Apple iPad or Samsung Galaxy. Every video vendor is rushing to offer a more portable video experience to extend the use cases they support and drive more value — and more business.  Mobility is a key information worker characteristic that video vendors are rushing to satisfy, and announcements over the last 24 hours bring two more requirements into focus:

• Usability. Yesterday (31 Oct., 2011), Dimension Data published a press release about their global, managed visual communications services.  They stressed the need to educate employees about how and when to use video — and their ability to assure availability and reliability — to increase adoption and thus the value of videoconferencing within an enterprise. Dimension Data will likely leverage elements of their Adoption Management Program (AMP) to educate users and drive adoption, while relying on their deep capabilities in delivering managed interoperable services across the unified communications and collaboration market to deliver reliability.