Polycom today announced expansions to its telepresence product line intended to gain a competitive edge over companies such as Cisco Systems and Tandberg, including better picture quality, centralized management software and a larger ecosystem of partner companies in a centrally managed end-to-end solution.

Polycom’s goal is to give enterprises who want to use telepresence to improve employee productivity and reduce travel a better opportunity to tie in all parts of their businesses, from the headquarters location with an immersive telepresence room to locations with conference rooms and desktop solutions, said Joan Vandermaten, vice president of marketing for video solutions at Polycom. Polycom also is working with service provider customers to enable them to offer managed solutions that tie all these different locations together for the enterprise customers, said Mark Roberts, vice president of ecosystem marketing.

For higher picture quality, Polycom is extending 1080p and broadcast-quality 720p at 60 frames per second throughout its telepresence product line which includes both immersive and room solutions, along with high-definition voice quality in stereo.

“We are upping the bar for room systems and immersive telepresence,” Vandermaten said. The 720p at 60 frames per second, in particular, delivers a high-quality picture to telepresence systems using less bandwidth,

“Unless you have very large screens or monitors that are auditorium-sized, the human eye cannot see the difference between 720p and 1080p.” Vandermaten said. “For most room-based videoconferencing, the screens are not large enough, and the distance from the screen is not great enough for there to be a difference. And the bandwidth issue is huge because companies want to deploy this across their networks, where bandwidth can become an issue.”

The newer picture quality is available on some systems now and on all systems by the first quarter of 2009 and is also available as an upgrade on existing system, Vandermaten said.