Polycom delivers entry-level room Telepresence solution

Polycom has introduced the new entry-level Polycom HDX 6000 room telepresence system. The full-featured Polycom HDX 6000 delivers Polycom's UltimateHD experience with high-definition (HD) video, voice and content sharing capabilities that enable effective face-to-face collaboration among geographically dispersed workgroups to help organizations improve efficiency and reduce costs by replacing travel.

“From improving collaboration to significantly reducing operating costs, Polycom telepresence solutions positively impact customer environments,” said Joe Sigrist, senior vice president and general manager of video solutions at Polycom. “The new Polycom HDX 6000 is a full-featured HD system at a price that can be quickly cost justified through the elimination of just a few business trips. Polycom continues to expand our performance-leading systems by providing more options for broad deployments and for smaller organizations looking to leverage the benefits of telepresence.”

“Nemertes Research continues to see growing interest in video conferencing to reduce travel and improve the ability of distributed workers to effectively collaborate,” said Irwin Lazar, vice president communications research, Nemertes Research. “Forty-eight percent of research participants now have policies to promote the use of video conferencing.”

Solutions like the Polycom HDX 6000 can meet a broad range of applications for various types of organizations. For example, Lake Travis Fire and Rescue in Austin, Texas covers nearly 200 square miles of dynamic terrain including lakes, vast undeveloped areas and heavily populated residential communities. This creates broader training requirements for the organization as they need to be prepared to handle everything from medical emergencies, wildland/structure fires, hazardous materials incidents, and land/water rescues.

“The distance between stations creates challenges for training. Using Polycom telepresence, we bridge those distances, which ultimately provides better response time for the public because teams can remain at their stations for training and meetings,” said Eric Carlson, Fire/Rescue Battalion Chief, Lake Travis Fire Rescue. “The Polycom HDX 6000 is a great all-around solution for our needs. It allows us to meet effectively and share information and training materials between our companies with outstanding quality for video, audio and content even when we need to run at lower bandwidths. It also makes the training process more efficient as we can train more stations in less time and even record sessions on the Polycom RSS 2000 that can be played back whenever needed.”

The Polycom HDX 6000 delivers 720p HD video quality (1280 x 720) at 30 frames per second (fps) starting at just 832 Kbps, and DVD-quality video (704 × 576) at 30 fps starting at just 256 Kbps. The experience is enhanced through HD stereo audio quality that enables natural, two-way conversations (Polycom 22 kHz HD Voice in StereoSurround), and the ability for users to share critical work in HD, including movies, spreadsheets, presentations, images, or physical items like barcodes, envelopes, and products through a variety of peripherals (PC, DVD player, document camera, etc.).

The Polycom HDX 6000 is based on established video conferencing standards and will interoperate seamlessly with the more than 1.5 million standards-based video conferencing systems in use today, including more than 50,000 telepresence systems shipped to date by Polycom. The plug-and-play system is easy to install and use and features Polycom's breakthrough Lost Packet Recovery (LPR) technology that optimizes video quality over IP networks and helps ensure a great user experience even on networks prone to IP packet loss and congestion.

The Polycom HDX 6000 expands Polycom's industry-leading telepresence portfolio, which includes personal desktop, flexible room and fully immersive telepresence solutions. Other complementary solutions include broad-scale desktop video collaboration, integration with telephony and unified communications platforms, and extending the reach of visual communication with live streaming, video recording and video content management. Polycom's integrated visual communication solutions address different application, space and budget requirements to help fully video-enable organizations for intra-company and business-to-business (B2B) visual communication.

Polycom also offers optional remote or onsite installation services to help customers get up and running quickly. The installation support is ideal for organizations that don't have in-house technical support or prefer not to install the systems themselves.