Polycom to Provide RealPresence to South Pole
Polycom to Provide RealPresence to South Pole by UCStrategies Staff
According to IDC, Polycom ended the third quarter with a 15.2 percent year-over-year revenue decline in the enterprise videoconferencing and telepresence market. Yet the company retained a hold on its 25 percent market share of the videoconferencing market. This makes Polycom second only to Cisco, who also reported a significant year-over-year revenue decline. In a broader perspective, the telepresence and video conferencing market reported a 4.8 percent drop in revenue during 2012’s third quarter, in comparison to the same quarter in the previous year.
Although Polycom may be getting a less than warm reception within the enterprise market, researchers in the South Pole are welcoming the company into the fold. Polycom recently signed a deal with the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston, to provide them with RealPresence videoconferencing platform. This will enable isolated South Pole researchers to receive telemedicine from UTMB.
The RealPresence-powered telemedicine network will cater to three U.S. polar research stations: Amundsen-Scott, which houses 120 researchers, McMurdo with 1,200, and Palmer with 40 researchers. Along with these, two Antarctic research vessels will also receive the telemedicine network.
“Our specialists help provide the second tier of care that's difficult or impossible for 'doctors on ice' to handle themselves,” said Dr. Scott Parazynski, director and chief medical officer of UTMB's Center for Polar Medical Operations. “It's incredibly expensive to transport a person to or from the continent, and in the middle of winter it's physically impossible to get people off of the South Pole. So if you can remotely diagnose and treat the patient, and then supervise his or her care, you're much better off.”
One of the main obstacles hindering the Antarctica project has been bandwidth. “The issue down on the ice is bandwidth, but it's greatly improved over what we had when we first started,” explained Oliver Black, systems analyst services manager at UTMB. “We didn't even have enough bandwidth for color back then. What we have today with Polycom is truly excellent video quality.”
In order to save lives at the South Pole research stations, collaboration is vital. According to Petr Jirovsky, senior research analyst for IDC's enterprise communications infrastructure group, this is also the solution for the floundering enterprise videoconferencing market.
“Video as a key component of collaboration continues to place high on the list of priorities for many organizations and we anticipate a return to positive market growth in 2013,” said Jirovsky. (CU) Link