Bobby Joseph, Country Director - Plantronics India & Middle East

"We have had a great start this year. Factors such as government initiatives towards ‘Digital India’ and end users investing towards the deployment of unified communication solutions across industries has led to our growth.

In July, we acquired Polycom, to accelerate and expand our vision of delivering the broadest portfolio of end points in the Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) ecosystem to customers.  

The combination of Plantronics and Polycom is now the partner of choice for users of communication and collaboration solutions as we offer unparalleled portfolio of integrated, intelligent solutions that spans headset, software, desk phones, audio and video conferencing, and cloud services.

•    Collaboration driven workforce - where we work and the way we communicate with our colleagues is no longer confined to a traditional four-walled office environment. Today, people are collaborating with colleagues across the globe and they want to connect with ‘the office’, regardless of their location or device. This growth in anywhere working and geographically distributed workforces mean that businesses will need to find new ways to empower employees with vastly different experiences and relationships with technology, ensuring they can collaborate effectively to drive the productivity.

•    Open offices driving demand for noise cancelling headsets and enhanced huddle rooms - thanks to the rise in real estate costs and growing need for modern workspaces, employers are deploying open offices. These open offices however result in increase of workplace noise which can be very distracting and stressful. To counter this, certain technologies like active noise cancelling and noise cancellation headsets are becoming the norm at workplaces. Also, companies are creating more huddle rooms as collaboration and productivity centers for employees.

•    Users wanting simple click and join - they don’t want to go looking for a meeting room ID, or a truncated number, or the smart board switch to upload documents for team discussion. We will expect to see end users continuing to demand more intelligent, conferencing solutions that can ‘do it all’ – whether connecting from a meeting room, personal device or third-party platform.

•    Meetings getting smarter and more mobile - technology, like the latest intelligent face-detection and voice triangulation cameras, wireless content-sharing, a simple ‘click to join’ meeting interface, AI and advanced analytics are helping meetings get smarter and more productive.

•   Rise in adoption of softphone telephony with organizations moving away from the traditional deskphones and deploying computer based soft telephony systems.

2017-18 has been a great year for us in terms of growth and this was a result of our expanded channel outreach, foray into new tier 2 markets and successful management of our large end user accounts."