Polycom delivers HD video conferencing media server for small and medium enterprises and distributed video networks.  Polycom RMX 1000 delivers UltimateHD and supports expanding use of visual communication across enterprise networks.

Polycom, the global leader in telepresence, video and voice communications solutions, today broadened the industry's most comprehensive visual communication portfolio with the RMX 1000, a high-performance multipoint visual communication conferencing platform for small and medium enterprises and branch offices of large enterprises. Complementing the existing RMX 2000 for medium and large enterprise networks, the RMX 1000 enables on-demand video collaboration supporting multiple sites in the same calls with UltimateHD – high definition video, voice and multimedia content sharing capabilities.

"The use of visual communication is growing because it effectively addresses major collaboration issues inherent to distributed, enterprise organisations as well as critical business challenges driven by globalisation, socio-economic factors and the move toward more environmentally sustainable business practices," said Joe Sigrist, senior vice president and general manager of video solutions at Polycom. "Our customers are looking to deploy video more broadly across their organisations from telepresence rooms to mass scale desktop video collaboration. The RMX 1000 supports this as part of Polycom's comprehensive solution portfolio for visual communication."

Both the RMX 1000 and RMX 2000 media servers are optimised for the unique requirements of high-performance visual communication. Based on open standards, the solutions enable multipoint video calls across different network environments and between different types of video devices, transcoding the various speeds and protocols to provide an optimal experience to each system based on the capabilities of the systems in a call. The RMX 1000 supports HD video, HD content sharing (H.239 using the highest quality H.264 compression) and unrivaled HD audio quality with Siren 22 Stereo which offers the benefits of both enhanced clarity (from 22 kHz audio) and StereoSurround, which separates voices when multiple parties speak simultaneously. Like the RMX 2000, the RMX 1000 supports secure conferencing through AES media encryption and provides an optimal experience even on sub-optimal networks with Polycom's breakthrough Lost Packet Recovery (LPR) technology, which minimises the damaging impact of network congestion and packet loss on the video call experience.
For small and medium-sized enterprises the RMX 1000 is a cost-effective solution for bringing high-performance multipoint video conferencing capabilities in house. The plug-and-play platform is easy to deploy and contains on-board capabilities for centralised scheduling and management.

For larger organisations, the RMX 1000 allows IT leaders to cost-effectively extend visual communication resources to the network edge in a distributed network environment. Complementing the existing Polycom RMX 2000, which would typically be deployed in the central office, the RMX 1000 would be deployed at smaller, regional offices. This distributed network design provides redundancy for continuity of operations, greater scalability and efficiency as well as minimises latency for video calls initiated from regional offices. The entire distributed network environment (endpoints, infrastructure and conferences) can be managed centrally through Polycom's new Converged Management Application (CMA) or ReadiManager SE 200. (See additional press release issued today titled: "Polycom Simplifies Enterprise-Wide Visual Communication with New Network Management and Desktop Video Solution")

"The RMX 1000 is a great high performance, multipoint platform for distributed video networks as well as a solid solution for small campuses," said Mark Crowl, Multimedia Educational Specialist, Information Technology, University of Oklahoma-Tulsa. "Set up was easy – we had the system up and running in under an hour – and we put the bridge through its paces, including cascading calls between the RMX 2000 and RMX 1000. The on-board management and scheduling capabilities are intuitive, and the HD video, content and audio quality is great and well suited for our distance learning and telemedicine applications."

The Polycom RMX 1000 is now available worldwide.

See whitepaper: scalable architecture for distributed video