So Far, Yet So Near

Polycom’s president for the Asia-Pacific, Europe, Middle East and Africa regions, Marco Landi, shares his thoughts on the potential for video conferencing solutions in the GCC, and why traditional workspaces are being transformed by advancing work cultures and technologies in the APAC-EMEA territory.

You manage a large chunk of the world for Polycom…

I took over Asia on 1st April, and have been in charge of Polycom’s EMEA region for two years. It’s a massive region to manage, and I was keen to work beyond EMEA. We also wanted to bring more consistency across the company. We don’t have a worldwide sales leader, so we decided to split the world in two, between myself and my counterpart, who runs the North and South America regions. It has made things tighter and more structured. So far, I’m really enjoying the role.

What’s Polycom’s outlook for the Middle East region?

When I took over two years ago, it was a bit of a struggle. Like everyone else in the market, we had suffered. I think we’re now doing a lot better. You could maybe say that we’d hit the bottom, but the last three or four quarters have really been strong. There’s a lot of opportunity, and this region is a particularly dynamic voice market, while video is still in a bit of a transition.

Avaya’s struggles and Cisco’s decreased focus on voice present opportunities for us. In terms of video, that’s where the biggest opportunity is for the Microsoft transition. The transition is from video conferencing being a separate, niche application to being integrated in the collaboration piece, where you put voice and video conferences, content management and instant messaging into one platform.

What kinds of transitions are your customers experiencing in terms of their use of your technology?

There are a lot of questions – not so much around the value of the technology, but more around the extent of the transition to newer usage. It’s no longer just a case of buying endpoints for a video conferencing room.