Setting the agenda: Ashan Willy, Polycom

• Features

• 07/06/2017

UC&C is one of the most interesting intersections in technology, where AV, IT, applications, software and services all converge. Ashan Willy from Polycom talks about its evolution.

Ashan Willy, senior vice president for worldwide system engineering and product management at Polycom, says: “Unified communications and collaboration has been on a journey through the decades. It started off with telephony and then in the late 1990s, early 2000s, IP took over because IP could offer applications that could sit on top of telephony. Over the last five years, we have seen further evolution and everyone has realised that UC&C is not homogenous.”

He continues: “The changes come in waves, and right now the wave we are riding is video. There are approximately 50 million conference room spaces worldwide and it is estimated that only 4% to 5% are actually populated with video, which means that there is significant room for growth.”

In addition, demand for video is also growing. Willy says: “Millennials are the ones using the products and they are familiar with video, they have grown up using video and they do not have the hang-ups about using it that older generations might have had. This is driving demand but there are negatives as well. They have different expectation from technology.”

The change in millennials’ expectation from technology and the evolution of their usage preferences has resulted in the rise of the ‘huddle room’. Willy says: “Out of the 50 million conference room spaces, about 40 million can be classified as huddle rooms based on the different definitions of the term. We see this as a major trend and it is one that Polycom is focussed on.”

The emergence of huddle rooms might also see more emphasis being put on the collaboration aspect of UC&C in the future. Willy says: “There are always a couple of main tenants when it comes to UC&C and I think you will see video and more integrated high quality content being delivered. But the other trend is going to be productivity. Everyone wants to collaborate, you want to be able to edit content and work together as a group on the same documents when you are in a huddle room. Whether it is annotation or sharing, it will be a core demand moving forward.”

While the Microsoft Office suite might be the most commonly used productivity software, it is by no means the only consideration for UC&C. Willy says: “You may have primary and anchor tenants but you will always have a variety of vendors that exist and will want to integrate into UC&C. New applications like Slack are coming up and you are also beginning to see more from Google. From our standpoint we see that it is essential to successfully integrate with these new players while still providing quality video and communication.”

Willy also believes that the playing field will continue to get more complex: “The unified communications and collaboration field is becoming more heterogeneous and I philosophically I believe that right now no one tool can be everything to everyone, those days are gone. This is because it is much easier to develop applications today. You can get engineers from college and use Javascript or Python and have an application out.”

He continues: “I think it is important to pick the winners correctly from the field and to be able to integrate with them. Polycom spends roughly 25% of its research and development on making sure that our products and platform can integrate with the key products on the market that we have identified.”

The large field of competitors means that the AV industry still has a crucial role to play in the UC&C world. Willy says: “Let’s say a customer wasn’t to use Skype for Business. The problem is that Microsoft has its own set of protocols and they aren’t talking to anyone else. This is where Polycom can step in and say we can provide the integration. The process is quite complex, but our job is provide a simple system which is not confusing for the user and easy to use no matter how complex the back-end might be.”

The continued evolution of UC&C and the position of Polycom as a platform that integrates different productivity tools and communication applications, coupled with the tech savvy demands of millennials, had lead Polycom to adapt its approach to UC&C.

Willy says: “One of the things that we try to do at Polycom is to make things ‘natural’, that is word that we use a lot internally from a user-experience standpoint. For example, the Centro for us was all about how people naturally work and sitting around a table and discussing matters is very natural. But then there are parts where you want to get up and walk around do what is comfortable. All these factors were taken on board during the development of the product.”

He continues: “Over the last few years, Polycom has been very focussed on user experience and we have gotten good results. We have been looking at things like industrial design to workflow and we have been integrating our findings into our products without confusing the user. This will become very important as we see the rise of asynchronous content into UC&C.”

In conclusion, Willy says: “In Asia, as the infrastructure begins to be built, things like video for UC&C will become easier. The next barrier to cross is cultural and Asia has a very young population. So as more young people enter the workforce adoption of video will continue to rise since they are familiar with it. Services like Facetime and WeChat in China re widely used and it will be interesting to see what other tools will be integrated into UC&C.” Editor’s note: As of publishing, Ashan Willy no longer works at Polycom.

Update 01-01-2017: Ashan Willy is no longer at Polycom.