Beginning with its innovative speakerphone in 1990, Polycom has been a leading force in video, voice, and content collaboration for 25 years. It recently introduced Polycom RealConnect for Office 365, which allows diverse videoconferencing endpoints to participate in Skype for Business Online calls. Polycom created and runs RealConnect in Microsoft Azure using open-source software. With Azure, Polycom slashed development time by half and can scale RealConnect instantly, deploy it globally and refresh it continuously.
Before you know it, there was Voice over IP, video and multiparty broadcast meetings and many other ways to talk and share information. Today, the videoconferencing landscape is chock-a-block with devices, software and services from hundreds of vendors, offering businesses and people dozens of ways to connect, communicate and collaborate over distance, using a variety of devices.
The result, however, has been a jumble of devices and software that often don’t work together, causing communication to stall.
Polycom, one of the world’s largest and most successful makers of videoconferencing (VC) solutions, recently introduced a product called RealConnect for Office 365 that bridges the gap between third-party VC endpoint devices and Skype for Business Online, the conferencing and meeting software included in Microsoft Office 365. Polycom created RealConnect using open-source software and runs it in Microsoft Azure.
This is the story of how Polycom, Microsoft and open source came together in a beautiful mashup to create a VC interoperability solution for the ages.
“Polycom and Microsoft have been partners since 2002,” said Laura Marx, Senior Director of Alliances Marketing at Polycom. “We have a shared vision to create end-to-end communications platforms for our joint customers that make daily communications fast and intuitive.”
As Microsoft has moved its communications and collaboration services to the cloud, Polycom has evolved its endpoint devices — cameras, microphones, large meeting-room monitors and more — to support cloud services. However, while most Polycom devices natively interoperate with Skype for Business Online, some older devices can’t talk to the Microsoft cloud services. “Many of our customers are moving to Skype for Business Online and want to bring their Polycom, Cisco and other third-party endpoint devices with them,” Marx said.
So Polycom worked with Microsoft to create RealConnect for Office 365, a video interoperability solution that allows third-party videoconference solutions from Cisco, Polycom, Lifesize and other vendors to participate in meetings scheduled by Skype for Business Online users. Skype for Business users automatically have video interoperability join information included in their Skype Meeting invites.
“RealConnect for Office 365 is a Microsoft-certified video interoperability solution for Skype for Business Online,” Marx said. “It’s integrated into the Skype meeting workflow, making it easy and intuitive to schedule a video interop call. Skype and non-Skype users join the same video call with one click and enjoy their familiar video and content layouts.”
RealConnect is also natively integrated into the Office 365 license flow, making it easy for customers to manage their Office 365 and RealConnect licenses in one place.
Polycom knew that it wanted to develop and run RealConnect in the cloud, to gain cloud-calibre scalability, economy and availability. It’s primarily an open-source software shop and some teams had used Amazon Web Services for cloud projects.
But when it set out to develop RealConnect, Polycom chose Azure. “We were surprised and impressed by the deep and thorough support of open source in Azure,” said Jeff Adams, Distinguished Engineer at Polycom, who headed up the RealConnect development effort. “It’s a whole new Microsoft! Our product primarily runs on open-source operating systems, so it was a huge benefit to have open-source support in Azure. We use Node.js, Go, Java, Python and Ansible, and they’re all wonderfully supported in Azure.”
Polycom worked closely with the Azure, Office 365, and Skype for Business teams to create RealConnect for Office 365 in a matter of months. “Development was much faster than usual, because we didn’t need to create things like our own container registry or web application firewall,” Adams says. “Instead, we used Azure Container Registry and Azure Application Gateway. For geo-redundancy, Azure Traffic Manager has been extraordinarily useful for getting us globally deployed—we currently run in five Azure datacenters with the sixth coming online soon. Multiple data centres also give us geo-failover.”
Don Eckhart, Senior Solutions Manager of Cloud Video-as-a-Service at Polycom, added, “By using Azure, we cut our development time in half.”
Thanks to the flexibility provided by Azure, Polycom can scale the RealConnect infrastructure up or down in seconds, from 5 to 2,000 virtual machines and back down again when usage shrinks. “Peak call time is between 10:00 AM and 2:00 PM,” Adams said. “The rest of the time, usage is much lower. We need capacity at peak hours but don’t want to pay for capacity at other times. With Azure, we don’t have to.”
Polycom uses the growing global network of Azure data centres to achieve geo-redundancy and high levels of availability, delivering a great VC experience to users. But this global reach also lets Polycom roll out the RealConnect service in many global markets without concern for regional compliance regulations.
“Microsoft has done a phenomenal job of helping us make sure that the Polycom network is highly secure, reliable and compliant with local regulations,” Eckhart said. “With the global reach of Azure, we can offer the RealConnect service anywhere in the world. We don’t have to chew up six months and thousands of dollars to jump through regulatory hoops in every new market; Microsoft has already done that work.”
Historically, Polycom products have been deployed on customer premises, which has hampered the company’s ability to refresh product functionality. It would release big product updates every six months and Polycom engineers would have to visit customer sites, back up the Polycom environments, take down those environments and install the new product.
But with RealConnect running in Azure, Polycom can make improvements continuously and deploy them instantaneously. Conversely, if an update causes a problem, Polycom can immediately roll it back.
“Running Polycom in Azure delivers huge benefits to our customers with regard to product freshness, performance, uptime and overall user experience,” Eckhart said. “We can rapidly iterate to improve the product and service quality, since both the RealConnect component and much of Skype for Business are microservices-based.”
Adams adds, “Feature velocity is profoundly faster in Azure. As we discover new devices and new customer needs, we can respond immediately, often building, testing and deploying code in the same day. Our customers benefit from that velocity.”
In October 2017, Polycom launched RealConnect Hybrid, which allows on-premises Skype for Business customers to use RealConnect. Polycom is also creating RealConnect One-Touch Dial, which allows one-touch connection between Polycom and other third-party endpoint devices and Skype for Business. These customers can join Skype for Business calls from their Outlook calendars.
“By using Azure services to develop all these new products, we saved two staff-years of effort,” Adams says. “We’re also working to connect RealConnect to Microsoft Teams and other Office 365 services. With Azure, we can go further faster than we ever could before.”
RealConnect runs on the Linux (CentOS) operating system on Azure Virtual Machines, with complementary microservices that provide instance scaling and load balancing. “We chose to use Azure Virtual Machines because they enabled us to easily migrate our existing Polycom virtualised infrastructure images from Hyper-V to Azure and upload a VHD,” said Chad Alexander, Software Development Manager at Polycom. “Azure Container Service provided simplified configuration and deployment using templates, which meant that we didn’t have to manage the DC/OS cluster ourselves.”
Polycom uses Azure Container Registry for the distribution of Docker images, Azure Application Gateway to provide web application firewalls and web access to RealConnect services and Azure DNS for DNS entries when deploying the application to new data centres.
It uses Azure Traffic Manager to direct calls to the appropriate data centre for an optimal user experience and Azure Load Balancer and Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets to rapidly scale the Azure infrastructure. The RealConnect team uses Azure Security Center to audit and help protect its infrastructure.
The software stack is entirely open source. The team used Node.js to write web services, Java to call infrastructure, Python for helper applications, Go for the application’s scaling subsystem and other open-source languages for other functions. “Azure offers APIs and SDKs in a variety of languages, which allowed us to freely choose the tool we thought was best for each situation,” Alexander said.
For spinning up RealConnect in a new Azure data centre, Polycom uses Terraform infrastructure-as-code software to create the microservices framework and Ansible to deploy libraries and configure the
RealConnect environment.
