Tell us about Accordent and Polycom.

Polycom recently acquired Accordent Technologies, a developer of award-winning enterprise video platforms used by large organizations to produce and deliver video-based assets for communications, training and educational purposes. This week, Polycom will launch Accordent Media Services – Powered by Windows Azure, the first enterprise media management system hosted on the Windows Azure platform.

What is Polycom’s Accordent Media Services?

Accordent Media Services – Powered by Windows Azure enables organizations to deliver “YouTube for the Enterprise” via an automated software-based video creation, management, publishing and delivery platform.  Based 100% on Microsoft technologies, the platform enables organizations to leverage their Microsoft infrastructure investments to deliver highly bandwidth-efficient, live and on-demand video for virtually any business scenario.   

How does Windows Azure benefit your customers?

Windows Azure extends the capabilities of the on-premise Accordent solution by enabling customers to experience the benefits of centralized media management on a subscription basis, without incurring the up-front network and storage hardware costs and complexities of deploying and maintaining an on-premise solution. 

What does the service include?

The service includes an installed, branded, and fully functional Accordent Media Management System, hosted within Windows Azure datacenters, which delivers content in various formats to widely distributed audiences via the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN). Customers will be able to submit content created from remote Accordent capture products across the cloud leveraging Microsoft Expression Encoder technology, video conferencing integrations, and desktop Microsoft Lync clients. The service will provide full enterprise video content management capabilities (categorizing, indexing, retention management, etc.), publishing to customer Microsoft SharePoint solutions, and scalable delivery of live and on-demand content over the Windows Azure CDN.

Why did you choose to build on the Windows Azure platform?

The choice of the Windows Azure platform was a natural one for Polycom, and an extension of its long-standing strategic partnership with Microsoft. The Windows Azure platform provides an open, standards-based environment to give customers exceptional flexibility and scalability. The solution also included all the elements required to deliver a world class, cloud-based media management solution, including the Windows Azure Virtual Machine (VM) Application Hosting, Windows Azure Virtual Storage, and Windows Azure Content Delivery Network Services.

Click here to learn more about Accordent.  Click here to read more about how other companies are using the Windows Azure platform.

Tweet