Polycom Helps Ireland’s Department of Environment, Community and Local Government to Reduce Costs and Prepare for Ireland’s EU Presidency

• 95 percent of meetings now take place using Polycom® RealPresence® video
• About 900 staff now use webcams and HD video solutions
• More than one-third of video calls involve interaction with the EU, reducing the carbon footprint and increasing productivity

London, UK – 4 September 2012: Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM), the global leader in open standards-based unified communications (UC), today announced that Ireland’s Department of Environment, Community and Local Government has selected Polycom® RealPresence® video solutions as an innovative way to enhance communication and collaboration between its staff and various agencies with which it does business. The solution will help reduce costs for a geographically dispersed Department with offices in Dublin, Ballina, Tubbercurry and Wexford. It will also provide important support in the run up to Ireland’s Presidency of the EU which commences in January 2013.

While the Department is in regular contact with the European Commission on a number of fronts, the international dimension of the Department’s work will take on particular importance before and during Ireland’s six-month Presidency of the European Council in the first half of 2013. The Department expects to see a significant increase in the demand for external video collaboration facilities during the course of the Presidency and also as they shadow the current Presidency for the six months prior to taking over.

A key requirement for the Department was the need for an easy-to-use, secure and stable video solution to visually connect staff with external stakeholders across dispersed locations.  The Department also wanted an open standards-based solution, to support high-definition, face-to-face, multi-party meetings that combine video, voice, and content-sharing to improve team decision making, productivity, and efficiency. The Department decided to procure a truly unified communications solution that could be managed centrally within their recently deployed Microsoft Lync environment. They needed a simple and intuitive solution for users to make HD video calls at the touch of a button from within a familiar Microsoft environment.

With nearly 900 staff supplied with webcams and HD video solutions, the Department also uses the RealPresence® Room solutions (HDX® 7000 and HDX® 4500) for real-time communication between decentralised locations and workers. Over a six-month period the Department conducted over 1850 meetings with over 95 percent using video. Polycom video is powered by the Polycom®RealPresence® Platform – the most comprehensive and interoperable software infrastructure for universal video collaboration –, which provides carrier-grade provisioning, management, scalability, reliability, and security, and minimizes network bandwidth consumption (as much as 50 per cent lower than competitive solutions), ensuring that EU-related conferences are prioritised and have sufficient bandwidth and reliability through the dynamic distribution of calls.

“Prior to deploying the combined Microsoft and Polycom solutions, we would have had various iterations of documents flying around the network. The increased collaboration has been hugely beneficial as meetings can now be done over a video call,” said Paul Mc Donald, Principal Officer for both ICT and Communications Units. “We can share the document during the video meeting and work on it together so everybody provides input. In the space of an hour or two you actually have a working document that may have taken weeks to complete in the past.”

The initiative to decentralise out of Dublin presented the initial challenge of reducing the Department’s carbon footprint in keeping with its directive to protect the environment, whilst still being able to collaborate in real time.

“Polycom support for multivendor environments makes our Microsoft Lync decision work. We were able to tie our existing endpoint investments with Microsoft Lync with the help of Polycom’s RealPresence Platform,” added Paul Mc Donald. “The ability to meet in a Virtual Meeting Room powered by Polycom makes our solution work.”

About The Department of Environment
The work of the Department of the Environment is carried out through six Divisions – Environment; Water & ICT; Community and Rural Development; Local Government; Planning and Housing; and Finance and Central Services. In addition, Met Éireann and the Local Government Audit Service are integral parts of the Department.

About Polycom
Polycom is the global leader in open standards-based unified communications (UC) solutions for voice and video collaboration, trusted by more than 415,000 customers around the world. Polycom solutions are powered by the Polycom® RealPresence® Platform, comprehensive software infrastructure and rich APIs that interoperate with the broadest set of communication, business, mobile and cloud applications and devices to deliver secure face-to-face video collaboration in any environment.  Polycom and its ecosystem of over 7,000 partners provide truly unified communications solutions that deliver the best user experience, highest multi-vendor interoperability, and lowest TCO.  Visit www.polycom.com or connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to learn how we’re pushing the greatness of human collaboration forward.

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Sarah Brambley
Polycom EMEA PR Manager
sarah.brambley@polycom.com