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Hello, my name is Cara Daly, I am the Product Marketing Manager for Polycom Video Content
Management Solutions. Today we will be going over the RealPresence Media Manager Version
6.5 Launch Training.
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As you can see from the Agenda, we are going to cover everything you need to know to be able
to talk confidently about Media Manager with your customers and spend a special amount of time
on features, benefits and differentiation as well as competitive information.
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Before we dive in, it is important for us to understand where the RealPresence Media Manager
fits in the complete portfolio of Polycom Video Content Management Solutions.
These solutions help customers capture video from any source, manage that video with rules and
logic and then deliver to any device.
As you can see from the left, we can support a very wide variety of methods and types of video
that can be captured and recorded and then all of that gets collected, transformed, organized,
protected and analyzed by the Polycom RealPresence Media Manager. After that, content can be
delivered over a wide variety of content delivery that works and viewed on a wide variety of
devices, ranging from Smartphones and tablets to video conferencing endpoints to digital
signage.
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The customer value for the RealPresence Media Manager is that it is scalable software that
equips organizations to manage all aspects of their video assets in any stage of their lifecycle.
Customers can upload any video source or format, make content searchable, access content
through a browser, support mobile device, upload and playback, manage content logically and
video enable their intranets.
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The positioning: this is a solution for organizations who want to manage all aspects of live
webcasting or on-demand video content, such as training videos and other types of video
archives.
The 6.5 version of the RealPresence Media Manager software provides a rich-base feature set
with industry-meeting total cost of ownership. It has simplified and flexible installation options. It
offers deep integration with multi-vendor IT environments. It provides simple automated role
based workflows for administrators and comprehensive user tracking and reporting.
Additionally, we are introducing RealPresence APIs to support custom integrations and
functionality.
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So to see what exactly is changing in the launch, let us review what we brought in our previous
launch.
So last year we released Media Manager Version 6.0 that had a lot of great features and
offerings. So what we introduced was a HTML 5 portal that had an embedded video player and
intuitive touch enabled navigation for Smartphones and tablets. HTML 5 made this work on a wide
variety of mobile devices.
We also offered mobility integration to transform content into the right format. Now this was
previously an option, we will go into how it is included in this release. But again, it is very
important to support mobility. We had additional signage integration, which provided support
through an open framework with Scala and X2O Media. And we also introduced a media utility for
IBM Sametime and we enhanced our integration with Microsoft SharePoint 2010.
But despite all of these fantastic solutions, we still had some very complicated integration
solutions. So we had different based feature sets across a lot of different editions and we had
over a dozen optional features and integration modules that made quoting very challenging for
partners and sales.
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So what we are doing now with Media Manager 6.5 is we are introducing a rich base feature set
with industry leading TCO. What that means is we are actually folding in a lot of features that
were previously a la carte. We have enhanced and simplified admin tools, we have enhanced our
mobile support and we are bringing out RealPresence APIs to encourage third party integrations.
We are introducing a formal integration with Blackboard Learn, which is a learning management
system widely used by universities and secondary education. Also we are introducing a new
Media Manager Appliance Edition, which is a fantastic turnkey solution that provides customers
with very quick installation on an appliance.
So the most important thing that we are bringing is simplified feature rich 500 concurrent user
pack of software licenses. This folds in all of those options. We will go into that in a lot of detail in
the next slide. And this really makes it very easy for customers to understand exactly what they
are getting and for sales people and partners to easily quote.
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So with this launch we are going to have a major SKU simplification. You can see there in the
column for current solutions we have a variety of editions of Media Managers and then we have a
lot of options from local database to Active Directory and LDAP integration, single-sign-on, a
RealPresence Media Utility for publishing out of Microsoft Lync, a RealPresence Media Utility for
publishing video content or audio content out of IBM Sametime, mobility integration and
transcoding. A testing and certificating modules, so users can design test surveys and polls, and
then we also had an option for RealPresence Media Director for people to create distribution
profiles for their content delivery networks.
So we are replacing all of those SKU in very simple, just a Media Manager Appliance Edition,
Media Manager Software Edition, or in North America only, a Hosted Edition, which is a software-
as-a-service. So these 500 concurrent user packs are very easy to quote and include all of these
features.
So why are we doing this?
Well we wanted bring disruptive industry pricing to our customers and offer them really compelling
total cost of ownership. And having this consistent feature set regardless of delivery method,
whether it’s the software edition, the appliance edition or the hosted edition, should really make it
easier for customers to understand and partners to quote.
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So let us go into the features, benefits and competitive differentiators here.
Being able to purchase everything as an appliance, software or hosted, really helps sales provide
their customers with exactly what they need in their unique way. So customers with virtualized
data centers want software editions. Customers with limited IT staff and scale prefer appliances
and customers who need software-as-a-service, would really prefer an OPEX module hosted.
So unlike some of our main competitors, such as Cisco Show and Share whose boxes are kind of
appliance only and are pretty expensive, Polycom is able to provide affordable, flexible Media
Manager offerings.
The licensing of 500 concurrent user packs really disrupts the industry pricing, especially for a
state of the art, fully featured Video Content Management Systems. Every user gets the full
features so they will all be able to upload out of Microsoft Lync, they will all be able to upload out
of IBM Sametime. Transcoding is included for mobile devices, so really there is no confusion over
who gets what. And then we do have a few options that are truly options, things like SharePoint
integration, Blackboard integration and ECDMs. So we have driven the complexity completing out
of quoting, understanding and purchasing and cost justifying Media Management without making
sacrifices in features or scalability.
This new release is much easier to install, administrate and to use. So we have designed it for
installers and out of the box defaults which makes much faster deployment, especially with the
appliance edition. It lowers administration cost, it eases the introduction of new capabilities and
promotes adoption and scale.
So really that is different from our competitors because it comes pre-configured with defaults that
just work out of the box and they can easily be modified to suit each customer, so we no longer
need Windows experts to install, configure, administrate or support Media Manager.
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In this release we are also introducing enhanced mobile support. So now you can upload mobile
videos from IOS and Android and Windows 8 and we are introducing full support for Microsoft
Surface RT Tablet. The competitive differentiator is that since we are using HTML 5, there is a
complete consistent and secure portal experience without needing device specific apps that
would get installed by a user.
Additionally, we are introducing package support and fully featured integration options for things
like, Blackboard Learn, which is a really important learning management system. We also still
support our Microsoft SharePoint 2010 integration, which has been a major competitive
differentiator for us.
Additionally, we are introducing APIs, which can be integrated into just about any portal or
application using this fully documented solution. So how that differentiates us from the
competition is that Media Manager can power these existing familiar portals with two way
collaboration without retraining users. So if they go to SharePoint they can see all of the video
assets there in the same ways as they would with other types of Enterprise video content. If they
are used to Blackboard and posting videos there, or watching videos there, Media Manager is
embedded to support that.
In terms of the APIs, basically you can embed Media Manager’s playback engine into any type of
portal environment.
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So let us go into a little bit more of the competitives. Let us provide an overview of what Forrester
recently released, which is their video platforms for the Enterprise Wave in Q1, 2013.
Forrester did conclude that Kaltura, Polycom and Qumu had the most feature rich applications
and you can see them in the upper right hand side of the quadrant.
On strategy, Polycom was ranked second only to Kaltura, which explicitly addresses both internal
and external use cases. So we really do have a leading strategy for a company that’s focused
solely on the Enterprise.
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So when we look at the competitive landscape, we can see that it is highly fragmented and what
we have done here is sort of grouped the different competitors by their types of features moving
from the left to the right. So Kaltura and Brightcove they have one platform for multiple use cases,
they are little less specialized and broader. And they have some specialties in support for user
generated content.
As you move more towards the right of the companies listed here I will go ahead and put a circle
on the ones where we have the most feature parity to. You see that we probably are aligned most
closely with Cisco and Qumu from a competitive and feature parity perspective because we
enable customers to leverage their video conferencing investments and they can work with their
existing ECDNs and publish to digital signage and those types of features. So this is just
important to know when you are going into accounts, who you might be seeing and how we might
measure up.
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So in order to position to win, we are going to have a look at Cisco Show and Share, what their
strengths & weaknesses are and how to position that and the same thing for Kaltura and Qumu.
So some of the strengths of Cisco Show and Share is that, of course, they do integrate with video
conferencing very similarly to the way we do and they do actually have some good speech to
technology in video platforms, which is something that, you know, is an advantage. But we can
definitely beat them, because they have some key weaknesses, especially when it comes to
Microsoft. So they have no SharePoint web parts for true integration and according to Microsoft
there are over 65,000 SharePoint licences out there.
So we can always use Microsoft to beat Cisco in those types of accounts. They have kind of a
clunky webcasting support and some limited file format protocol and Codec support. Also one of
their big weaknesses is price. So what we can do is, especially when you are in a Microsoft
account, we can tell the complete end to end Microsoft story. How we can capture out of Microsoft
Lync and we can publish that video to SharePoint and have all the benefits of Media Manager
running in the background. Additionally, with our new simplified total cost of ownership, we can
really compete with them on our disruptive pricing.
Kaltura media space was also ranked as a leader by Forrester, and they are the only vendor
targeting explicitly internal and external video content management. We are mostly focused on
internal. So they do have some pretty good strengths and they do have a lot of APIs and a good
technology partner eco-system. However, again, they do have some weaknesses that we can
leverage when we are selling against them. So they do rely on a lot of partners for core enterprise
functionality like webcasting, and they also offer a little bit less CDN support than competitors,
such as us, who have a lot of CDN support. So really we can win with our end to end solutions,
we have a complete solution for webcasting with video conferencing integration, without relying
on partners, and we also provide centralized management of the capture devices because of this
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end to end solution, which gives us a lot more automated workflows, where we are not relying on
partners or other types of integrations.
Qumu is another competitor where we do have a lot of feature parity there. So they have some
really good features, they support video conferencing integration, webcasting and search. They
have both apps and browser support for mobile and also they work with a lot of CDNs in a similar
way to the way Polycom Video Content Management Solutions do. However, we have heard that
they have a lot of deployment complexity and we have heard some complaints about their user
experience. So Media Manager delivers a complete, consistent portal experience through a
browser without needing device specific apps and that consistent experience really helps end
users understand and use our product across different devices. Additionally, our new installation
wizards really simplify the deployment complexity and we think we can compete very well against
Qumu in that area.
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So let us look at the case study. We have a global chemical company who really wanted to have
live CEO town hall webcast globally, to all associates. They needed these recorded events to be
available for on demand playback and they needed an end to end solution for all of this to just
happen in an automated way. From the webcast to the recording to the global distribution, one of
their major requirements was integrating with SharePoint.
The solution that we proposed involved RealPresence Capture Stations, Media Manager
Enterprise Editions, which had Active Directory, testing and certification, Media Manager Services
Agents for some of that CDN integration and of course, Microsoft SharePoint.
So what has happened is, employees can now visit SharePoint to seamlessly view live streaming
webcasts inside of their SharePoint environment. We were able to architect the solution to fit their
customer requirements; exactly what they wanted to do - everything from the capture side of it all
the way through to the content delivery and distribution side of it. So again, this really plays to our
strengths with our integration with CDNs, SharePoints and having a really robust feature set.
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And I hope this was very helpful for your understanding of how to sell and position Media
Manager 6.5 with your customers.
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