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Interoperability and versatility for any desktop program is essential in today’s evolving telecom community.

 

That’s why Polycom (News - Alert), a leader in telepresence, video and voice communications solutions, announced the release of its scalable CMA Desktop video collaboration app that now supports Apple (News - Alert) Mac OSX.

 

Laura Shay, director of marketing, video solutions, Polycom, told TMCnet in a recent interview that the announcement expands the company’s highly scalable desktop video solution across computing platforms.

 

“It provides an enterprise-level solution for organizations using Apple computers, one with centralized provisioning and management capabilities and one that is interoperable with existing standards-based video conferencing systems,” Shay said.

 

According to Joe Sigrist, senior vice president and general manager of video solutions, Polycom, the system will provide customers unrivaled flexibility and choice. This way, users can confidently standardize on Polycom solutions for end-to-end visual communications knowing they will support their unified communications needs, including multiple computing platforms, including the new Mac compatible software.

 

While the company also launched the solution with Windows support, there’s a lot of customer demand for Mac support.

 

“Many organizations have both Windows and Mac systems within their organizations,” Shay said. “The CMA server supports both Windows and Mac video clients simultaneously on a single server, which effectively meets our customer requirements.” 

 

“Polycom CMA Desktop sets a new standard for flexibility, performance and interoperability for desktop video collaboration and we are happy to deliver on customer demand, particularly in the education, healthcare, creative services and entertainment markets, for Mac OS X support,” Sigrist said.

In addition to the Mac OS X, Polycom’s release is also integrated with the converged management application video network management system that offers a simpler, more efficient way to provision telepresence deployments.

“A single Polycom CMA server can support both the Windows and Mac OS X versions of CMA Desktop simultaneously,” company officials said, which can eliminate challenges that users tend to deal with when deploying desktop video such as scalability, ease of use, quality control and management and control.

 

According to Shay, going forward, Polycom predicts that video conferencing will become more integrated and be an easily accessible tool within a company’s commonly used workplace applications, such as instant messaging platforms, calendar programs, IP telephony solutions, and collaboration applications.

 

“Polycom is driving this today in a standards-based way through the Polycom Open Collaboration Network with partners like Avaya, Microsoft, IBM, Siemens (News - Alert) and BroadSoft,” Shay said.