Poly believes introducing high-end video and audio into small huddle spaces is important. Poly’s Brian Phillips tells Zoe Mutter how its latest release – Poly Studio – optimises collaboration in the working environments of enterprises of any size and with varying budgets.
The open office arrived with so much promise, with goals of improving spontaneous collaboration and enabling deeper connections with colleagues. However, the reality is that it’s also loud and full of distractions, which is impacting business efficiency, according to Brian Phillips, senior manager, product marketing. group solutions, Poly. “As a result, today’s open office spaces have started to see an explosion of smaller meeting spaces and huddle rooms as enterprises realise the value of spontaneous, creative environments that enhance close collaboration in small teams.
“Huddle rooms are gaining in popularity, but out of an estimated 32 million huddle rooms globally, only 2% include solutions for video conferencing. There is a huge opportunity for organisations to bring high-end audio and video into the small meeting space, increasing productivity and enabling a better use of limited and expensive office space.”
Poly Studio plug-and-play video bar has been introduced to meet this demand for HD audio and video capabilities in smaller spaces, creating a productive environment that does not require a sizeable installation of technology. Designed with the modern office in mind, it aims to transform small meeting spaces into collaborative huddle rooms that offer the power of a large conference room. Workers can hear, see, work and collaborate at the touch of a button and connect from multiple video platforms, including Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business, GoToMeeting and Cisco Webex.
Video features include a 4K resolution and 5x electronic zoom camera and automatic group framing that focuses on speaking participants, adjusting the view if people enter and leave the room so everyone talking can be seen clearly. Intelligent features such as Poly NoiseBlock and Acoustic fence technologies can automatically mute and remove distracting background noises and other unwanted sounds to improve call quality.
“No matter where people are or what device they are using, workers can connect to any voice call or video meeting with ease, regardless of the different video and collaboration tools customers, partners and other organisations use, for ultimate productivity,” says Phillips. “Our customers are seeing the value in bringing a richer, more immersive experience to their huddle rooms and centralised manageability is enabling them to expand video to new spaces they hadn’t thought possible.”
Poly plans to add new capabilities to Studio through software updates as well as release complementary future solutions to enhance the room experience and enable IT to capture analytics that measure the use and effectiveness of their rooms to further optimise their investment in collaboration technology. The company is already developing the technologies with new integrations such as Google Voice and Alexa for Business that open up possibilities such as voice activation of tasks and AI setting up the call for a meeting.
