Today we’re excited to launch the Poly API Marketplace, a new platform where the Poly developer community can find, connect to and manage Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) across Poly’s vast partner ecosystem. The Poly API Marketplace is an open, future-proof platform with support for dozens of API types, including those from our awesome Poly Lens insights and management platform and Poly Clariti – our highly secure meeting platform.

Why has a communication company like Poly gone through the effort of opening an API marketplace to foster and support a community of developers? Because we listened to you – our partners and customers.

Hybrid work, transitions to the cloud, divergence from standards and a return to office have all led to a crowded marketplace of unified communication offerings, which has in turn made managing these separate, yet critical systems incredibly complex. The Poly API Marketplace centralizes our APIs into a single location while providing visibility into all the available developer assets across Poly’s products.

Enabling Developers

You told us you needed an API marketplace platform that enabled developers to discover relevant APIs, fostered developer community support and offered fast integration with code snippets in multiple languages. Poly provided the APIs and RapidAPI helped us bring the Poly API Marketplace to reality. “Meeting the experts at RapidAPI was all it took,” said Robert Manassero, Director of Product Management at Poly. RapidAPI is the world’s largest API hub with more than four million developers that discover test and connect more than 40,000 APIs.

“The Poly API Marketplace makes it easy to find everything, catalog and access tools, and with the continual expansion of new developer experiences from the teams at RapidAPI, the Poly API Marketplace will only get better over time. Empowering a positive and collaborative developer experience is primarily why we picked RapidAPI to partner with on this initiative,” explains Robert.

Rory Ferguson, Senior Product Manager at Poly, adds, “The marketplace brings us closer to the developer community allowing them to innovate and customize our products in ways we hadn’t thought about. We at Poly are excited to see partners and customers leveraging the Poly API Marketplace to create high-value solutions.”

Examples Available to the Poly Developer Community

Accessibility, Support and Community

Another important goal with the marketplace was to build a community, complete with a “playground”, where developers can meet, share ideas, test those ideas, tear them down and rebuild them to continually improve. “We want to facilitate, encourage and support our developer community in every way possible to ensure our mutual success as we build new collaboration experiences together,” said Rory.

“The guiding principle of the new API marketplace is to provide our developer community opportunities to innovate and create in ways that continue to build new experiences, making collaboration easier for everyone by leveraging our platforms. Of course, building a rich community of developers takes time and expertise. We can’t wait to see what this community creates,” explains Robert.

Poly Lens and Poly Clariti

Poly API Marketplace was born from our private video conferencing software, Poly Clariti, and our cloud-based device management and insights platform, Poly Lens, where there has been a growing need to share and leverage existing APIs within the Poly ecosystem. Over the last two years, Poly has been laser focused on consolidating the management and insights platform into Poly Lens, which encompasses our entire Poly portfolio of video and voice technology, from personal devices to large room systems.

With the introduction of Poly API Marketplace, we are empowering organizations with the tools they need to create a single pane of glass centered around their entire unified communications infrastructure. This means simplified management, monitoring and reporting—all of which make life easier for IT teams and service providers. With this, IT professionals will be able to customize the end user experience, improve response times, enable faster onboarding and build custom dashboards for return-on-investment calculations.

We have already seen creative uses of APIs with Poly Clariti. For example, a large government contractor in Europe is using Poly APIs to customize call scheduling. The standardized approach has benefited the large organization by simplifying a common task and, therefore, speeding the call entry process. Another creative use has come from a global consultancy firm who used APIs to provide recording controls, meeting a business need for centrally recorded meetings. Rory explains, “In some cases, call recording is set to automatic mode to meet the policy requirements, while others are more on-demand recordings—but all of them are powered by our Poly API flexibility.”

A New Horizon for Customers

Poly and RapidAPI’s partnership is a perfect fit, matching our shared commitment to the developer community. Together, we provide an optimized, approachable experience. Customers with private video infrastructure will look towards the marketplace to further grow custom applications in their specialized environments, while other organizations will consistently leverage robust data and management from Poly Lens into their own platforms. The capabilities for video and voice collaboration will continue to evolve and grow, which is exciting news for Poly and our customers.

To learn more about the Poly API Marketplace, come find us here.

Poly Clariti is a private, all-in-one video conferencing and collaboration solution utilized by large enterprises, federal government agencies, financial institutions, and healthcare organizations that need to deploy, manage, and monitor from within their own data center or privately hosted cloud. Clariti can be deployed or hosted by the customer, a managed services provider, or Poly Managed Services, which means the customer retains 100% control. 

Poly Clariti is Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC) certified by the United States Department of Defense’s (DoD) non-service operational test agency for Information Technology (IT) and National Security Systems (NSS), a requirement necessary for deployment within government institutions that require stringent security and oversight. 

Deploy, Manage, Meet 

Poly Clariti is for any customer that needs a private, all-inclusive video conferencing solution that they wish to own end-to-end. Poly Clariti gives you access to and full control of your organization’s all-inclusive collaboration software. Deployment models give you the ultimate flexibility to secure your solution on-premises in virtual machines, or in a private cloud with Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services. This means your online meeting rooms are secure and protected. 

Managing your organization’s collaborative solutions can be overwhelming, especially as they have scaled so quickly. From networking to room systems and end-user accounts, each component offers its own level of complexity. Poly Clariti gives you the tools you need to inventory, manage, and monitor the full solution for an optimal end-user experience.  

Poly Clariti enables end-users to easily schedule and enter meetings with a single click, sending email notifications to all participants with the meeting room assigned, audio dial-in details, help desk information, and other meeting information.  

How Clariti Works for You 

Supporting a distributed workforce in the era of hybrid working requires collaboration solutions that deliver on security and privacy, which is where Poly Clariti comes in. Large-scale organizations that have already invested in standards-based hardware can easily deploy Clariti to get the most out of their investments.  

Clariti supports backward compatibility for those customers looking to get the most out of their prior investments in infrastructure and video endpoints. Poly Clariti scales to 1,000 call participants making it one of the leading high-scale solutions for two-way conferencing. 

Poly Clariti Workflow Lite Add On 

Poly Clariti Workflow Lite is a software app installed as an add-on extension to Microsoft Outlook. The app enables users to easily create calendar invites and join meetings with Poly meeting rooms or a browser from within a Poly Clariti solution deployment.  

Poly Clariti Workflow lite makes scheduling and joining meetings a breeze and drives better adoption of video conferencing and collaboration within your organization. Poly Clariti integrates and works natively with both Microsoft O365 Outlook client, stand-alone Microsoft Outlook app, and Microsoft Outlook Web Application.  

Ready to Deploy? 

Poly customers can easily upgrade to Poly Clariti with an existing service agreement to realize the new levels of security, compliance, and rich end-user experiences available. The all-inclusive solution has incredible scalability and is ready to be deployed on the Poly devices you already have such as the Poly Studio series, the Trio series, the CCX and VVX series, and more!  

To find out more about Poly Clariti, click here. 

Poly has a world-class reputation for building professional-grade, reliable collaboration products that are easily deployed, configured, and managed. So….you might be asking yourself what is the value of investing in a Poly+ support contract?

The value of Poly+ goes beyond hardware reliability and significantly extends the Poly limited warranty.

REAL-TIME SUPPORT

With many of us working at home or in a hybrid model with a more flexible schedule, being able to access support out of standard business hours is essential. Poly+ provides priority access to the technical support team 24×7 so that your query is answered quickly. The team can also initiate a video chat with you to guide you through troubleshooting and get you back up and running as quickly as possible. Their expertise extends beyond Poly products to those of our leading ecosystem partners, including Microsoft, Zoom, GoTo, BlueJeans and others, so you don’t have to make multiple phone calls.

RAPID REPLACEMENTS

If you need a replacement product our pre-paid and advanced hardware replacement assures you of minimum downtime and supports business continuity. The product you need will be shipped the next business day to your preferred location – home, office, hotel or wherever you are working.

DISCOUNTED PROFESSIONAL SERVICES

Exclusive professional services discounts for Poly+ customers offer the opportunity for remotely delivered services such as Return to Office and hybrid working strategy consulting, and remote product installations – saving your business time and money.

UNLOCK EXCLUSIVE POLY LENS FEATURES

Poly+ customers also have access to premium software from Poly Lens not otherwise available – including network insights and the notification center. Network insights expand the ability of IT staff to troubleshoot network issues for end-users no matter where they are working and give end-users a better understanding of how their network is performing. Keeping devices up, running, and ready for action is critical and when those devices are in trouble, you want to be alerted as quickly as possible. As part of the Poly+ service, the notification center has been expanded to include notifications sent from Poly Lens into ServiceNow, providing you with the insights you need to act when it matters most. Once configured, device alerts from the Poly Lens Notification Center are delivered right to your ServiceNow instance and include visibility to when devices go offline and when devices have software updates available.

WHY POLY+ OFFERS SO MUCH MORE

Poly+ is often described as the superhero cape wrapped around our existing warranty which gives you so many additional benefits. Here’s a snapshot of the differences:

POLY+ AVAILABILITY AND PRICING

Poly offers award-winning Poly+ globally on Poly devices – both for personal and business use. While the cost is based on the device or room covered, it starts from as little as $1 a month.

WHY POLY+ IS WORTH IT

Poly+ is worth the investment and is the only support you’ll need. Poly+ eliminates the cost of repairing hardware failures and gives you the peace of mind that the experts at Poly will do everything to have you looking and sounding your best and be up and running 24×7, no matter the challenge – Poly+ is the way to go!

To learn more visit the Poly+ webpage or watch the one-minute introduction video.

It’s no secret that the right collaboration tools can supercharge our productivity. However, until now, we’ve been in the dark in terms of how the tools we leverage and the workspaces we occupy are being utilized. Business leaders are often left guessing… Are you wondering how many people are using your conference rooms given the popularity of Hybrid Work? Are meeting rooms being over or under-booked? Are people happy with conference space or are there enough video-enabled rooms? A better speakerphone? 

Many IT tools in use today offer a way to remotely manage collaboration devices, but few excel at delivering the necessary insights to truly understand how to optimize their deployment. Collecting information in a single office might not be a big challenge for their IT administrators or facilities managers. However, it can become a great deal more complex when you have a large office, multiple locations, flexible and remote workers across global time zones.  

Today we’re excited to announce a new Room Insights feature available for beta testing within Poly Lens, our device management and insight administration portal.  Room Insights provides IT managers with much-needed visibility into how meeting rooms and collaboration tools are being used (or not used!). Gaining actionable insights into the utilization of workspaces is increasingly vital as organizations plan and execute their return to the office while supporting their hybrid teams spread across geographies and time zones.  

Do you need data to inform future investments? How do you explain to executive management what technology you need for a productive workforce? Poly devices have the capability to collect data about room usage that can be fed into Poly Lens. Poly Lens then aggregates this data around workspace utilization into actionable insights that can be leveraged by the organization to maximize the investment. This helps you go beyond good management and set your employees up for total success whether they are in-person, hybrid or fully remote. 

Below are metrics for all the rooms being managed across our example company. This can be broken down into room-by-room data as well. This type of clear data can help IT and facility managers make informed decisions about technological investments and how best to optimize workspaces. 

Scheduled but Empty 

Your conference rooms cost money and are typically at an availability premium.  That’s why it’s important to understand their utilization. In the insight below, you can see the room has been scheduled several times per day, but no one was present in the room. This means this valuable meeting space shows ‘booked’ for all employee calendars but is actually sitting empty – argh!  This simple insight can save frustration, time and money by canceling the unattended meetings.  

Understanding Meeting Attendance  

Meeting participant count helps to inform the proper allocation of space and technology to outfit your rooms. To make informed decisions about room utilization, you need visibility into how many people are using your spaces. Imagine a 4-person meeting happens in your large conference room while a 10-person meeting needs to squeeze into a smaller space.   Poly Lens delivers these insights directly to you, allowing you to see patterns of utilization and act.  In addition, in our current pandemic world, these insights allow informed policies as workers return to office while trying to follow appropriate health and safety guidelines. 

 Delayed Start and Run Times 

Most meeting participants experience frequent delays in meeting start times. The delays can be tied to hard-to-understand user interfaces, meetings running over, disconnected equipment, deferred software updates, and more. Every time a meeting starts late – teams are unproductive and can grow frustrated – compounded by the reality that some employees are in-office and some remote.   

Room Insights within Lens can track late meeting start times, meetings that run over the scheduled time, making others late. These intelligent insights are delivered to Poly Lens from our smart devices in the room.  And we’re not stopping here.  As devices get smarter and provide more raw data, Poly Lens will tailor that data to your needs.  

Join the Beta 

We’re excited to open these new Room Insights features for beta testing and look forward to customer feedback on how these new tools are empowering IT and facilities managers to make informed and important decisions. The beta is open now to any Poly customer with a Lens account. Sign up for a free Poly Lens account here and let us know how Room Insights is helping you take action to make the best use of your devices and workspaces. 

It’s no secret that the right collaboration tools can supercharge productivity. However, up until this point, we’ve been living in the Dark Ages about how our workspaces are being utilized.

Introduced today at ISE 2020, Poly Lens is a new SaaS offering from Poly that combines device management along with powerful, actionable insights about how Poly collaboration endpoints and the workspaces that house them are being utilized. By capturing the data available through deployed endpoints, IT and Facility Managers can ensure their conferencing solutions are fully optimized throughout their organization. It’s the Renaissance of workplace collaboration endpoints, ushered in by Poly.

When deployed in combination with our next-generation G7500 and Studio X family of video endpoints, Poly Lens provides a unique view into how the organization is functioning as a whole. IT and Facilities Managers need actionable insights to inform big-dollar decisions about how to equip and manage their workspaces. Understanding how meeting rooms are used, peering into device health and adoption trends, and ensuring all devices are up to date with cloud-based management, together empower businesses to maximize their investments and ensure seamless roll outs.

Intelligent Software — Informed Decision Making

Making Deployments a Breeze

In recent years, many organizations have experienced a sharp spike in the number of deployed endpoints. This can be explained by the fact that that there are now 33.3 million huddle rooms worldwide (Frost & Sullivan, 2019). Getting a new deployment of devices up and running in your cloud-based management system can be a painstaking process. With Poly Lens, we have drastically simplified the unboxing and device on-boarding process where IT can quickly scan a QR code as they are setting up the units and quickly register the devices to Poly Lens. By streamlining this process to a nearly out-of-box experience, we’ve made it easy for IT managers and administrators to quickly and effectively set up and manage Poly devices.

Device registration to Poly Lens

Intelligent Endpoints

For most organizations, soaring real estate costs have resulted in a push toward shared working spaces and open office designs. Today, more than ever before, it’s essential that companies optimize their utilization of these shared workspaces and their technology. In practice, this means actively managing a vast number of deployed devices, monitoring service adoption, and meeting room utilization. The ripple-effect of issues such as failed call start attempts can greatly impact the productivity across the board. Poly Lens spotlights the health and efficiency of companies’ devices and soon, room usage, so they can align their IT resources to their end-user needs.

Benefits of Cloud-Based Management

With a few clicks of the mouse, IT managers can configure settings such as, displays, call server settings, network quality and more. Why is this important? Today, video deployments occur at a much larger scale. This puts a significant strain on IT resources. By simplifying the process of device installation and registration to the management platform, much of the IT burden is alleviated. When new devices are needed across town in another office, IT managers can ship a video unit to the employee for self-install and Lens registration – It’s really that simple.

Cost savings and increased security are inherent to cloud-based solutions. When organizations are no longer responsible for buying, hosting, and managing their own servers, they can hang on to a big chunk of change. In terms of storing private company data, organizations shifting to the cloud will benefit from sophisticated security protocols that are insured by industry leading cloud solutions.

Device Optimization

Poly Lens identifies and prioritize actionable insights that help maximize user adoption and device uptime through an intelligent newsfeed. The newsfeed ensures the most important and urgent insights are always at the top of the feed, helping IT efficiently address any issues that might arise. The insights gathered by our video-conferencing technology gives information such as, the number of devices that are in a disconnected state, connected but unused, call minutes per week, and more. Equipped with this data, companies can make smart decisions about how to invest resources.

Poly Lens dashboard view of endpoints insights

Meeting Room Utilization

What happens when a larger meeting room is booked weekly for only four participants? Well, until now, nothing. Available soon, the Poly Lens newsfeed will provide facility planners with intelligence about how and when rooms are being used and, therefore, how to make best use of the space in the present and moving forward. There’s no need to go around with a clipboard to count how many people are in each meeting room anymore, Poly Lens will handle the heavy lifting.

Cloud-based Service Flexibility

With a predicted 75 percent of important workloads (including video) moving to the cloud by 2021 (Frost & Sullivan, 2019), Poly Lens delivers a solution with flexible purchasing methods that enables businesses to be more agile and innovative in the face of change. Delivered through a single platform, Poly Lens’ interface is uniquely poised to capture insights regarding device adoption and usage over time and across providers. This means you can change VaaS providers without losing valuable and historical insights. The result is zero-capital expense for buying, powering, and maintaining servers.

Poly Lens Availability

Poly Lens is now available for Commercial Preview for the Poly G7500, a video device that combines content collaboration and video conferencing capabilities and the Poly Studio X30 and X50 all-in-one video bars. We will continue to add new capabilities to this cloud-based service and over time and Poly Lens will evolve to support Poly conference phones, desk phones, and headset offerings.

For more information on Poly Lens, please visit: Lens.poly.com

Unified Collaboration Aids in Zero Hunger Mission

Welthungerhilfe, based in Bonn, Germany, has been serving the world’s most impoverished areas since 1962 with clean water, food, education, and governmental policy guidance. The non-profit has a goal of “Zero hunger wherever we work” by 2030 and relies on unified collaboration to help them get there.

Situation

Much like any large, global organization, WHH conducts business operations by collaborating with many satellite offices around the world. The experienced team had become accustomed to regular communications to plan and execute their usual projects, but wanted a more holistic UC strategy that went beyond their current video installation.

The goals WHH had were to update the user workflow so that it required little or no training, and to improve the speed at which video calls were connected – no matter where the users were or what solution they were using.

Solution

“An important part of the UC strategy was to engage the staff at all levels to identify exactly what solutions would best to suit their needs.” Dietmar Kraume, Director UC Technology & Presales, SoftwareOne.

The staff related they were happy with using Microsoft Outlook to schedule meetings with peers in the office or remote. With Polycom’s Microsoft integration it was a natural fit to add ‘one-touch-dial’ capabilities to the normal meeting workflow.

“We’ve had such great success with the approach that we rarely get help calls, which frees me up to tend to other IT services.” – Andraes Dahmen, IT Referent.

The easy meeting entry has been so well accepted that WHH IT staff have added more meeting automation in the rooms with EagleEye Director. The camera technology for framing each active speaker has added to the demand so much that it’s rare to see conference rooms go unused during the day.

With the WHH office setting going well, it was time to set their sights on enabling remote, and often temporary outposts with communication and collaboration.

“Especially in times of crisis, our teams require flexible solutions that can reliably connect from some of the most technologically challenged parts of the world. When disaster hits, we are often the first organizations ‘on the ground’. This means that we may have limited network capabilities, and limited onsite technical expertise.” – Josef Frei, Sr. Advisor Safety and Security Management

Building on this successful implementation, SoftwareOne recommended expanding the solution with Polycom RealConnect to connect remote teams through Skype for Business. The flexible solution allowed the current video conferencing investment in Group Series to easily and reliably extend UC into the most technically challenged areas of the world, bringing everyone together to solve the most critical human needs.

Watch the video:

Products Used

• Polycom RealConnect
• Polycom Group Series 500
• Polycom Trio 8800, 8500 Conference Phones
• Polycom Pano
• Plantronics headsets

Established in 2010, Bihar Agricultural University (B.A.U.) in India conducts education, research, extension and training activities in agriculture, with the ultimate goal of improving the quality of life for farmers. Through consistent training and education programs, B.A.U. empowers farmers with unprecedented access to information, helping them to improve agriculture and livestock production across India.

Challenges

Indian farmers face numerous challenges, including the lack of awareness about recent developments in the field of agriculture, the lack of consistent training programs to improve their education about crops, and the lack of a common platform to interact with specialists, scientists and stakeholders.

What’s more, many farmers in remote areas do not have easy access to information. In fact, according to research conducted by the National Sample Survey Organization in Bihar, less than 1 percent of farmers get information on modern agricultural technology from the public extension system, and about 13 percent of farmers get their information from input dealers.

Agriculture is the primary source of livelihood for a large majority of people in India, and it is the most significant contribution to the country’s national gross domestic product (G.D.P.). To support farmers, the government has used information and communication technologies (I.C.T.) more innovative ways to help farmers enhance their knowledge and skill sets.

I.C.T. for agricultural education

With a pivotal mandate to provide farmers with efficient technical guidance and support through I.C.T., B.A.U. looked for technology solutions that would ensure high-quality audio, video and content-sharing experiences.

“There was an urgent need to ensure that the farmers have access to information at their doorsteps at the right time. We needed to bring in radical changes in the way we deliver our agricultural extension programs to tune it with the fast-changing national and global scenario,” said Dr. R.K. Sohane, Director of Extension Education, B.A.U.

“In conjunction with requests from the faculty, we decided to look for the best video collaboration technology to help us with this objective. We selected Poly, as it met our criteria of providing high-quality video and voice, and also enabled us to integrate into our existing network easily.”

B.A.U. deployed Poly’s video endpoints and bridging solutions to:

• Provide live demos and training for farmers at their locations
• Collect real-time crop analysis by working with scientists to evaluate the performance of crops
• Connect 20 Krishi Vigyan Kendra (farm science centres) with six constituent colleges to support farmers and students
• Share knowledge via video-enabled buses that are driven to farmers’ fields, as a part of the Kisan Gyan Rath programs
• Use drones for surveying, crop monitoring and filming for broadcasting through video conferencing

By deploying Poly’s video collaboration solutions, B.A.U. is replacing face-to-face meetings with virtual meetings, where scientists and trainers can meet and collaborate with farmers from anywhere with HD quality—just as if they were sitting across the table from each other. This has enabled quick information sharing with the farmers and has drastically helped save travel time and costs.

“Before the implementation, it was difficult for us to train our farmers. Scientists had to travel for hours to interact with farmers and provide them with input on the latest technologies or updates,” said Dr. R.K. Sohane. “Today, thanks to Poly’s video conferencing solutions, we can save a considerable amount of time and cost—and increase the reachability of knowledge for our farmers.”

Through this innovative project, Bihar Agricultural University has furthered the education of nearly 100,000 farmers. As a result, the farmers have significantly improved the quality of their lives and the lives of the people they serve.

Featured Products
Polycom RealPresence Platform
Polycom RealPresence Group Series

This story was produced by Marty Sexton and Rachita Mohan.