Expanded portfolio of Polycom® RealPresence™ HD voice and video solutions now interoperable with Microsoft® Lync™.
Polycom is pleased to announce an expanded portfolio of UC solutions directly interoperable with Microsoft Lync that now includes Polycom's legendary standards-based wireless, desktop and conference phones as well as the general availability in North America and Europe of the Polycom CX7000 - the first and only group collaboration optimized for Lync. With this extended integration, we offer customers THE broadest set of choices - more than 40 systems - to enhance their Lync environments and make collaborating by voice, video or content sharing from the boardroom to the desktop or on-the-go easier and more reliable than ever before. Learn how these unique solutions from Polycom and Microsoft help your customers transform their enterprise by driving team work and productivity up while driving costs down.
Don’t take our word for it:
Perkins Coie Enhances Collaboration and Communication with Polycom® CX5000.
International law firm Perkins Coie represents companies across a wide range of industries and stages of growth—from start-ups to Fortune 100 corporations. Its mission is to be a world-class legal service provider dedicated to uncompromising integrity and quality by adhering to its core principles, one of which is teamwork. At Perkins Coie, teamwork encompasses communication, collaboration and operating as an integrated firm. However, achieving that ideal of teamwork can be a challenge when trying to connect more than 700 lawyers in 15 offices across the United States and in China.
A major competitive advantage for Perkins Coie is the ability to leverage any of its 700 attorneys, regardless of physical location, to build the very best team for each individual client. For example, its Fortune 100 client service teams comprise lawyers from a large number of the firm’s many practice areas, resulting in a team with members located hundreds or even thousands of miles away from one another.
“While our offices are in near constant communication, that has always been accomplished through traditional conference calls or travel,” explains Michael Chase, HR & CR Project Manager at Perkins Coie. “We had a handful of Polycom video conferencing systems installed, but we weren’t realizing the full potential of the deployment because they didn’t connect all of our offices. Requests started to come in from partners and offices that were not video equipped to find a way to improve communication firmwide.”
The initiative found a business owner when it was moved into the marketing department as part of an internal communications portfolio of projects. With the goal of demonstrating the value of video conferencing and building a video conferencing culture within the company, Chase and his marketing colleagues began a firmwide implementation of the Polycom® CX5000 System.
“There are a lot of consumer grade video solutions out there, but we needed a business quality solution, one that our systems department was comfortable with from a security and reliability perspective. Polycom has the quality a business needs....”
Michael Chase, HR & CR Project Manager at Perkins Coie
An Integrated Solution
Part of Polycom’s line of unified communication solutions for Microsoft Live Meeting and Microsoft Office Communications Server, the Polycom CX5000 allowed Perkins Coie to easily add group video collaboration to its existing Microsoft Live Meeting implementation. Fifteen Polycom CX5000 systems were integrated quickly and seamlessly into the Perkins Coie infrastructure and deployed at each of the firm’s offices in the United States.
“We knew a requirement for making this video network effective was to include all of our offices, no matter how big or small, in the roll out,” says Chase. “And the Polycom CX5000 is so cost effective, it made perfect sense.”
The Polycom CX5000 systems are being used on a regular basis for practice group meetings, committee meetings, client meetings, interviews, and special events like virtual retreats.
“With the Polycom CX5000, we were able to plug in a video solution quickly, on an existing platform, and in a very cost effective manner,” says Chase.
In addition, Chase points to the fact that everyone in the firm was already comfortable with and knew how to use Live Meeting, as a driver of adoption.
“There are a lot of consumer grade video solutions out there, but we needed a business quality solution, one that our systems department was comfortable with from a security and reliability perspective,” adds Chase. “Polycom has the quality a business needs and the portability as well.”
Immediate ROI
For Perkins Coie, enhanced collaboration is the true measure of return on its video investment.
“Ramp up and use of the equipment was immediate, we’re still in the beginning stages but we’re seeing amazing benefits already,” says Chase. “For example, the Construction Group Chair was so impressed with how much better his team meeting was when he could look at people, he said ‘I want all my meetings over video.’ And we’re hearing that same response from people throughout the firm.”
Chase also characterizes dollar-figure ROI as immediate, recounting a single meeting that linked 70 Business Practice Group attorneys in five different offices over video. “The travel costs we saved on that meeting alone easily covered what we spent on the video equipment,” he says.
A meeting of all 300+ Perkins Coie partners that is usually held in person has been planned for video. “With the soft economy and travel costs, it made so much sense to hold the annual partner meeting via video,” explains Chase.
Perkins Coie partners have also started using the video systems for interviewing. Given the positive results, Chase expects that to be a popular application moving forward.
In addition, clients are reaping the rewards of the Perkins Coie video deployment both in terms of better communication and cost savings. Recently, a client and attorney in the Seattle office were able to connect over video with the client’s financial advisor located in Chicago. Chase estimates the client saved $1,000 in travel costs by not having to fly the expert to Seattle for the meeting.
A Stepping Stone
“We’ve begun to build the culture of video conferencing that we set out to create. We’re so pleased with the Polycom CX5000 solution that I definitely see it in our roadmap moving forward,” says Chase. “People are already starting to understand the value of the face-to-face communication that video conferencing enables. I could see within a few years moving toward a more comprehensive video deployment.”
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