6 months on from the coming together of these two respected names, deepening collaboration between the providers is enabling powerful strides in truly unified communications and collaboration. As Paul Dunne, EMEA Channel Director, explained:
“Ourselves and Polycom had been on very cordial terms for many years, because we were all in that space, at the core, selling solutions around collaboration. Plantronics were all about personal audio, and Polycom were around video rooms - it made sense, when you're looking at a collaboration solution, you need audio, you need a video solution, you need some sort of a platform…It’s like when two people who’ve been together for ages suddenly announce they’re getting married”
Beyond ‘can we all hear everyone?’
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Paul Dunne[/caption]
And unifying the providers was the key to expanding the conversation and enabling a much broader view of customer needs and expectations in collaboration and communications, moving beyond the functionality to bigger questions.
After 16 years with Plantronics, Dunne is well aware that this is all about timing. “In the early days of UC, all of the questions were around, ‘is this stuff actually going to work?’ Technically, there were a lot of issues. Now we all know it works, so we can talk about the human factors in collaboration - remote working, being part of a remote team, managing a remote team…Dealing with feelings, perhaps of isolation in some cases, how do you cope with all of that? And how do you deal with cultural diversity in managing work, when your team can be anywhere?”
The Three Bs
At Poly, the three key components of any collaboration solution involves talk about Three Bs, Bricks, Bytes and Behaviour. And just being able to take the ‘bytes’ aspect, the tech, for granted is not enough - the physical location needs to be set up for a flexible or agile working, and then you look at behaviour, “which is that whole HR piece”. All three elements need to be optimised, for the solution to be optimised.
