3 Essentials for the Modern Meeting Space – Virtual, Video and FlexibleBuilding the workplace of the future today

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An AVI-SPL White Paper

Introduction The traditional view of workers stuck in traffic jams or piled into public transportation heading for offices where they will spend 8-10 hours in cubicles is fast becoming a thing of the past. Today’s workforce is more likely to be working from home, a coffee shop, hotel lobby, or airport waiting area. Harnessing these remote workers so they can collaborate with other staff members can be a challenge.

A Wainhouse Research report found that on average, over half of meetings include remote participants attending via audio, video, or web conferencing. “Power meeters” normally have eight out of 10 attendees connecting remotely. The study’s findings reveal that the more frequently someone meets, the more likely their interaction will include virtual attendees. Their conclusion is that the higher the use of collaboration applications and services, the greater the benefits.1

This shift toward worker mobility means the workplace of today must increasingly accommodate both physical and virtual workers. More frequently, decision-making is happening by committee so enabling collaboration is crucial. Organizations are now devoting more of their office footprint to smaller, open collaboration spaces. To be truly effective, these new spaces must include virtual access.

Is your organization heading down this path? Do you know what needs to be incorporated into these new collaboration spaces? Addressing these issues means leveraging the advancing collaboration technologies that are now available.

This paper will outline three essential elements of your modern meeting space — virtual access, video capability, and flexibility – and the best way to incorporate them into your UC environment.

1 White Paper: 3 Essentials for the Modern Meeting Space – Virtual, Video and Flexible (+01).866.559.8197 www.avispl.com

Table of Contents

1 Introduction

2 Virtual Access

4 Video Capability

8 Flexible

10 Getting Help

10 Summary

11 About AVI-SPL

11 About Polycom

11 Resources

Follow Us:

1 The Collaborative Enterprise: How enterprises are adapting to support the modern meeting, Wainhouse Research and Logitech, 2015.

2 White Paper: 3 Essentials for the Modern Meeting Space – Virtual, Video and Flexible (+01).866.559.8197 www.avispl.com

Virtual AccessTo fully leverage an investment in physical real estate space you must include virtual connectivity. Virtual access is a critical element when it comes to your overall collaboration strategy. Providing face time in a virtual environment enhances team engagement and drives efficiency for today’s mobile worker. The growth of mobile device endpoints makes virtual access a necessity for any collaborative workspace.

Connecting these remote workers also requires rethinking your office workspace. In the past, business meetings were scheduled, formal events with defined start and end times. Since smaller, dispersed teams now meet on a more frequent, ad hoc basis, there is less need for traditional large conference rooms and a greater requirement for small spaces.

This has resulted in the growth of the “huddle room,” a meeting room that due to its size or layout can accommodate only a small number of attendees.

2 Understanding the Huddle Room, Maximizing the Value of these Underutilized Spaces, Wainhouse Research, October 2015.

Wainhouse Research estimates there are between 30–50 million huddle rooms

currently in operation — more than 25 times the number of large group video rooms2

3 White Paper: 3 Essentials for the Modern Meeting Space – Virtual, Video and Flexible (+01).866.559.8197 www.avispl.com

Huddle rooms may be smaller, but they still need the latest technology to be effective collaboration spaces. Polycom enables this advanced collaboration through technology solutions like Polycom® RealPresence® Web Suite and Polycom® RealPresence® Collaboration Server.

RealPresence Web Suite combines exceptional voice, video, and content sharing easily and naturally through your web browser. This innovative and powerful web collaboration tool provides universal access for distributed workforces, enterprise-grade B2B video collaboration, and B2C video conferencing.

RealPresence Web Suite allows you to arrange impromptu or scheduled meetings by automatically sending invitations including attached documents and a web link for simple click-to-connect convenience. Advanced features include high-resolution multi-stream document sharing, whiteboard, blackboard, and annotation. Content-only mode lets participants join with audio/video on a room system while also viewing content on their personal device. RealPresence Web Suite optimizes smaller meetings through a WebRTC mesh call that will auto escalate to a bridge if a non-WebRTC endpoint joins the call.

By virtually connecting remote participants, RealPresence Web Suite can enable faster decision making, help integrate diverse teams, and cost effectively extend collaboration.

The Polycom® RealPresence® Collaboration Server is another solution Polycom provides to enable virtual access for your teams. Designed to meet the need for a dynamic, scalable, and reliable platform, the unique architecture of RealPresence Collaboration Servers achieves a low total cost of ownership through high port density, enhanced bandwidth utilization, and integrated multi-protocol support without expensive external gateways that add cost and complexity. Dynamic resource allocation provides the appropriate resources per AVC call to eliminate wasted HD resources.

RealPresence Collaboration Servers offer high resiliency through hot swapping of media cards, network interface fall-over, and full system level redundancy when integrated with RealPresence® Distributed Media Application™ (DMA®).

The straightforward administrator interface helps enable consistent, in person communication experiences without cumbersome technology, speeding the rate of video collaboration adoption and increasing productivity.

Ultimately a remote workforce needs user-friendly tools, high quality audio, content, and video, and a seamless experience across any device. This requires having a technology partner that can provide interoperable solutions that offer secure connectivity, ease of use, deployment, operation, and management.

4 White Paper: 3 Essentials for the Modern Meeting Space – Virtual, Video and Flexible (+01).866.559.8197 www.avispl.com

Video CapabilityThe rise of virtual collaboration has increased the need for video communication — the next logical step from simple voice conferencing for the modern meeting space. According to a report from Nemertes Research, almost half the companies surveyed either have or are working toward implementing integrated desktop, room, and mobile platforms to provide seamless video conferencing capability. Those that have already integrated video endpoints report far higher overall video success than those that haven’t.

3 out of 4 respondents have extended or are evaluating extending video conferencing to mobile devices. 3

3 Pervasive Video Collaboration Benchmark Report, Irwin Lazar, Vice President and Service Director, Nemertes Research, 2013.

5 White Paper: 3 Essentials for the Modern Meeting Space – Virtual, Video and Flexible (+01).866.559.8197 www.avispl.com

Polycom is working to meet the needs of the dynamic and modern mobile workforce by providing solutions that enable high productivity regardless of location. The Polycom® RealPresence Centro™ and Polycom® RealPresence Debut™ are the newest additions to the Polycom technology suite and combined with Skype for Business, provide a powerful solution set for dispersed organizations.

Polycom RealPresence Centro is a stand-alone, all-in-one huddle space solutions that allows meeting participants to easily interact from any of the four touch-sensitive monitors that put remote attendees at the center of the action. Gatherings “in the round” have been a standard set up for groups since the beginning of time and RealPresence Centro provides that configuration for the modern workplace.

Dismantling the traditional rectangular meeting space and removing seating hierarchy allows people to engage and collaborate at a higher level. Polycom RealPresence Centro draws participants to the center of the experience, regardless of their location. With 360-degree cameras and sensors, and intelligent switching, RealPresence Centro creates a virtual circle where everyone remains in close eye contact – even as people move around the room on the near or far side. Built for real collaboration, RealPresence Centro pairs with BYO devices – desktop, phone, tablet – allowing everyone to see, share, and annotate meeting content.

RealPresence Centro paired with Skype for Business provides a true huddle space solution that’s plug and play ready and promotes equity and inclusion for both remote and in-room participants.

6 White Paper: 3 Essentials for the Modern Meeting Space – Virtual, Video and Flexible (+01).866.559.8197 www.avispl.com

Polycom® RealPresence Debut™ is an enterprise grade conferencing solution made simple and affordable for huddle rooms and smaller spaces. It provides cost-effective collaboration for smaller organizations that are ready to move from consumer-grade alternatives that are fine for social media interaction but don’t measure up when it comes to work related collaboration.

The compact, all-in-one design of RealPresence Debut makes it simple to set up and removes cable clutter in the room. It provides 1080p HD video and clear audio thanks to Polycom NoiseBlock™ technology that eliminates outside noise distractions. A camera specially designed for smaller spaces ensures that everyone remains in view. Simple design enables quick setup without the need of technical resources.

In addition to its enhanced video solutions, Polycom is providing the next generation of voice conferencing technology as well. Polycom® RealPresence Trio™ is the world’s first smart hub for group collaboration. RealPresence Trio transforms Polycom’s iconic three-point conference phone to the next level by incorporating visual collaboration and content sharing into one tabletop device. Clear audio and HD visuals enable real time video interaction with its 5-inch color touch screen and intuitive navigation.

7 White Paper: 3 Essentials for the Modern Meeting Space – Virtual, Video and Flexible (+01).866.559.8197 www.avispl.com

Polycom RealPresence Trio provides one-touch meeting connection as well as wired or wireless connectivity with personal devices at an affordable price that allows for mass adoption across every meeting space. Combined with the Microsoft Surface Hub, RealPresence Trio creates an interoperable solution that improves the whole room audio experience. The combination not only brings new collaboration technologies into a room, but also enables seamless integration with existing conference room solutions.

As you analyze whether video communication will deliver significant benefits to your organization, it’s important to consider the latest collaboration infrastructure delivery models that eliminate many of the most common barriers to implementation and adoption.

Budget-constrained organizations sometimes struggle to justify investing in video conferencing equipment. However today’s more economical newer hybrid solutions are simple, powerful, cloud-ready, and available to dynamically expand concurrent user capacity on demand. An enterprise will pay for the capacity they need now and for higher usage only as the business need grows. Hybrid models can serve as an insurance policy to help protect against capacity constraints and provide much needed video access for your teams.

8 White Paper: 3 Essentials for the Modern Meeting Space – Virtual, Video and Flexible (+01).866.559.8197 www.avispl.com

FlexibleAccording to a report from Wainhouse Research, today’s workers attend meetings from a variety of places. Conference rooms (39% of respondents) and workspaces in the office (35%) make up the bulk of meeting locations, but 18 percent attend from a home office and eight percent connect from “the road.” The number of devices used to connect to meetings is also diverse with respondents naming smartphones, mobile phones, and tablets as collaboration tools. Only a third have not accessed a meeting using a mobile device. 4

Many people no longer think of work as a place to go but instead as a way to get things done. The traditional office is giving way to more open, shared, cost effective combinations of public and private spaces. Productivity and collaboration no longer depend on a shared physical location. This increased flexibility means team members need to engage, participate, and innovate from the workspaces they create via secure connections on any device, anywhere in the world.

Polycom addresses this need for mobile connectivity in the modern meeting space with applications that enable meeting access from both Android and IOS devices. Polycom® RealPresence® Mobile for Apple® iOS and Polycom® RealPresence® Mobile for Android™ are powerful, enterprise grade collaboration apps that extends video communications beyond the typical conference room setting to professionals on the go. The solutions combine innovation, interoperability, and security that are scalable and cost effective.

Polycom® Concierge is a software feature within the RealPresence® Group Series that allows users to control the RealPresence Group Series endpoint with a personal device. This allows users to send and receive content on a laptop, select from different content sources, annotate and save for later use, and transform a laptop into a virtual whiteboard for greater collaboration.

4 The Collaborative Enterprise: How enterprises are adapting to support the modern meeting, Wainhouse Research and Logitech, 2015.

9 White Paper: 3 Essentials for the Modern Meeting Space – Virtual, Video and Flexible (+01).866.559.8197 www.avispl.com

Polycom® ContentConnect™ Solution is an integral part of Polycom® RealConnect™ Skype® for Business workflow, enabling collaboration with anyone, anywhere, from any device. ContentConnect allows users to easily schedule, join, and experience a high quality video and content collaboration meeting across different devices and networks. ContentConnect is a virtual appliance that provides bi directional content sharing between Skype for Business and traditional standards-based video endpoints. It shows shared content in the proper Skype content stage for an optimum user experience. ContentConnect supports multiple Skype for Business clients – desktop, mobile, web app, and Lync Room System – through native Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).

Integrating collaboration tools into the daily workflow enables employees to focus on gaining competitive

advantage and driving greater market success.

A FLEXIBLE WORKFLOW THAT’S CUSTOMIZED FOR YOUR ORGANIZATION ENCOURAGES PRODUCTIVITY

10 White Paper: 3 Essentials for the Modern Meeting Space – Virtual, Video and Flexible (+01).866.559.8197 www.avispl.com

Getting HelpThe myriad of available technology solutions can make setting up a modern meeting space a daunting task. That’s why leveraging the expertise and experience of a full service integrator can be a smart business decision.

AVI-SPL can design and deploy video collaboration systems that improve the way your organization works. Our teams of certified technicians and engineers bring together interactive displays, presentation systems, and control systems for peak productivity and engagement. Our extensive knowledge of UC technology in general and Polycom solutions in particular allows us to help you realize your goal of enhanced alignment and knowledge sharing among your employees, partners, and clients.

SummaryThe collaboration needs of dispersed, far-flung organizations demand efficient, simple remote access, mobility, and flexibility. Thanks to the development of more powerful technology from Polycom, unified collaboration communication now includes content sharing, white boarding, and annotation along with other tools that make it possible to have active “virtual meetings.”

Today’s modern meeting spaces must be virtual and flexible, and include the latest in video technology. With these essentials, your UC space can effectively connect remote staff leading to better decision making, enhanced customer response, and greater overall business success.

11 White Paper: 3 Essentials for the Modern Meeting Space – Virtual, Video and Flexible (+01).866.559.8197 www.avispl.com

About AVI-SPLAVI-SPL designs, deploys, manages and supports the systems and environments that enable communication and collaboration. AVI-SPL has highly-trained and certified system engineers throughout offices across the United States, Canada, EMEA in addition to an international network of solution providers in 30 countries. Visit www.avispl.com for more information or connect with AVI-SPL on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

About PolycomPolycom helps organizations unleash the power of human collaboration. More than 400,000 companies and institutions worldwide defy distance with secure video, voice and content solutions from Polycom to increase productivity, speed time to market, provide better customer service, expand education and save lives. Polycom and its global partner ecosystem provide flexible collaboration solutions for any environment that deliver the best user experience, the broadest multi-vendor interoperability and unmatched investment protection. Visit www.polycom.com or connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn to learn more.

Resources:

1 The Collaborative Enterprise: How enterprises are adapting to support the modern meeting, Wainhouse Research and Logitech, 2015.

2 Understanding the Huddle Room, Maximizing the Value of these Underutilized Spaces, Wainhouse Research, October 2015.

3 Pervasive Video Collaboration Benchmark Report, Irwin Lazar, Vice President and Service Director, Nemertes Research, 2013.

4 The Collaborative Enterprise: How enterprises are adapting to support the modern meeting, Wainhouse Research and Logitech, 2015.