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Polycom Video Collaboration Increases Productivity for the Vaillant Group and Improves Work-Life Balance Across 20 Countries

Posted on Tuesday, September 18, 2012

"With the Polycom RealPresence Platform, I can be in London at 10am, Paris at 2pm, Istanbul at 4pm, and home for dinner," says Christoph Schnier, Group Purchaser IT and telecommunications

London, UK - Sep 18, 2012 : Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM), the global leader in open standards-based unified communications (UC), announced today that the Vaillant Group, a global supplier of heating, climate control, and ventilation systems, has chosen to use Polycom® RealPresence® video solutions to enable 13,000 employees across 20 countries throughout Europe and Asia to connect and collaborate via HD video.

“At Vaillant Group, we believe it is important to work with ‘best in class’ solutions and suppliers,” said Klaus Scheid, Head of Group IT Infrastructure, Vaillant Group. “We opted to work with Polycom for several reasons. Polycom’s close relationship with HP and Microsoft was important to us and influential. The quality of Polycom’s video solutions and their ease of use were equally important. Additionally, the Polycom® RealPresence® Platform provides the flexibility we need as we grow, enabling us to install more video systems or add mobility devices such as tablets and smartphones, with limited upgrades to our existing infrastructure, helping to control cost.”

“With the Polycom RealPresence video collaboration we aim to reduce one day business trips out of the office by 15% and two day trips by 5%. That will lead to a reduction of 700 trips per year, which is equivalent to 450 days of unproductive travel time saved. The video collaboration network will also have an environmental impact with a reduction of 400 tons in carbon dioxide emissions,” says Gürdal Ergüven, Group IT Director.

The Vaillant Group has realized several additional benefits from Polycom including:

Reduced travel – Several departments, including Purchasing, Finance, and IT, hold regular monthly meetings connecting to up to 10 sites by video. Prior to Polycom video solutions, each attendee would travel to one location to meet for half a day.
Increased team engagement – Today dispersed teams meet face-to-face on a more regular basis. Everyone is encouraged to meet via Polycom RealPresence video and is able to connect from multiple locations.
Reduced carbon footprint – As a sustainable company the Vaillant Group’s environmental policy goes beyond their products and packaging to controlling and reducing travel to further protect the environment.
Improved work-life balance - Employees who previously travelled often now have a better quality of life. “With the Polycom RealPresence Platform, I can be in London at 10am, Paris at 2pm, Istanbul at 4pm, and home for dinner,” said Christoph Schneir, Group Purchaser IT and telecommunications.

Polycom Solution at Vaillant Group

The Vaillant Group selected a mix of Polycom® RealPresence® Telepresence Room and RealPresence Desktop video solutions supported by the Polycom RealPresence Platform, the most comprehensive and interoperable software infrastructure for universal video collaboration. The components of the RealPresence Platform implemented by the Vaillant Group are Polycom® RealPresence® Collaboration Server, Polycom® RealPresence® Resource Manager, Polycom® Video Border Proxy™, and Polycom® RSS™ 4000. Polycom recently announced a rich new suite of open APIs for developers, partners, and customers to integrate business apps such as billing, scheduling, directory, management, and monitoring with the RealPresence Platform, making it much easier to enhance and extend the value of RealPresence video solutions to new industries, new use cases, and new users. Together with HP, Polycom designed and delivered the complete solution in less than eight months.