Polycom Introduces New Adoption Services Aimed at Making Video Collaboration Ubiquitous in Corporate Work Environments

Polycom has introduced its Adoption Services portfolio as a turn-key, high-impact solution to help customers create a video collaboration culture in their organization. The Adoption portfolio consists of four elements: consulting to establish requirements built on a clear understanding of business context and intentions, an online training portal, promotional campaign reinforcing the value and advantages of video collaboration, and cloud-based analytics service (an interesting net-new concept) to help gauge the video acculturation of the organization. The four new services are billed as augmenting Polycom's existing technology optimization services focused on ensuring that infrastructure and video environments are capable of meeting the needs of users.

All this is interesting, but certainly not new among video collaboration vendors. In fact vendor services stacks are designed to support these types of services. The Polycom stack, for example, includes the elements: Design, Deploy, Maintain, Manage and Optimize. Cisco uses a similar set: Plan, Design, Implement, Operate and Optimize. The main goal, then, appears to be to raise awareness of its full lifecycle of video collaboration services among current and prospective customers, including its capability to manage integration with Microsoft Lync, IBM Sametime and other UC platforms.

It's a reasonable question to ask if this campaign is a net benefit to the channel - particularly members of Polycom's Certified Service Partner (CSP) Program, since customers could just as easily engage Polycom Global Services as a CSP partner for these services. As the press release states, "Polycom's Global Services organization also offers a full range of services to maximize customers' ROI throughout the product lifecycle, from design and deployment to maintenance, management ... and optimization of existing solutions." CSP partners are, themselves, billed as "partners who provide service and support to customers as they integrate voice, video, Web and data into core networks." Clearly steps need to be taken to avoid channel conflict here.