‘Polycom expects to triple revenues this year’

Headquartered in Pleasanton, California, Polycom is a market leader in
high-quality, easy-to-use video, voice and web-conferencing and collaboration
solutions. Some of the products are the ViewStation, SoundStation, the Global
Management System TM, MGC100 TM and Net Engine among others. In India, Polycom
has been involved with

Lucent Technologies, Aventis, Ranbaxy, Cadila, Infosys, P&G, Reliance
Infocomm and Escorts. Robert Hagerty, CEO, Polycom, in an interview with
Dataquest, outlines his company’s strategy for the future among other things.
Excerpts:

On the business strategy for India:

Primarily, our biggest efforts are in the four segments of enterprise,
government, telemedicine and distance learning. We are working on how we can
work closer with service providers. We have a traditional customer base of large
multinationals and even as we serve them, it is increasingly making more sense
to provide services to them locally rather than remotely. We also have plans to
expand across South India, especially in Bangalore and Hyderabad. India should
look forward to Polycom’s larger presence, more exciting technologies. We are
also expanding and talking to software development companies in India to help us
expand into software development.

On technologies, what is Polycam bullish about in India?

Wireless, definitely. In our project with Escorts’ implementation of
telemedicine we used ISDN. For government projects it is more of VSAT. But if
you look at our vision, technologies are beginning to evolve where there is
enough bandwidth over a wireless connection. We can also move on to video over
the wireless. Broadband lets our technology work better even with much larger
deployments.

On alliances with the government:

We are a provider to the Indian government and work is going on a lot of
tenders. We sit with them occasionally and get product feedback from them and
then use this feedback for developing our next generation equipment. With the
government we provide services for the business of the government. We are
working with the government on projects where they are connecting all districts
and blocks.

Can you tell us something about your alliance with
Escorts?

Escorts has been using telemedicine for more than a year now and we have
become involved with them over the last few quarters. Polycom has been involved
with telemedicine for a number of years, so this was just a logical step.

Moreover, we have been selling through resellers for quite a
while now, but 9 months ago, we realized that there was an emerging opportunity
and we set up our team here in India.

On costs going down:

We don’t lead the network, because somebody else provides it and a lot
depends on the cost of the network going down. The cost of the equipment
continues to come down because of improvements in technology. Semiconductors are
getting faster and also cheaper. We have seen that migration of technology
continuing down the price points. Lastly, we build our equipment with life cycle
investment so that we are able to upgrade equipment that we introduced five
years ago and bring the latest technology. The latest algorithms that we have
put into our equipment is H264. This is a new compression algorithm that
provides twice the picture quality with the same bandwidth in older generation
equipment.

On Ploycom’s revenues:

Our efforts are primarily sales and marketing as of now. Last year we had a
turnover of about $5 million. We expect to triple that this year. Our investment
was less than a $100,000 last year. This year’s budget is over $300,000.