Enterprises will spend USD 5 billion on videoconferencing and
telepresence solutions in 2015, Infonetics predicted in a recently
released study.
Last year, revenue for these technologies grew 18 percent, reaching
USD 2.2 billion worldwide, the research firm said. As businesses
around the globe continue to seek out new ways of cost-effectively
and efficiently communicating, their spending on videoconferencing
and telepresence is expected to increase, Infonetics said.
"Communicating via video continues to be one of the top trends in
telecom, as evidenced by strong growth in the enterprise video
market. Businesses worldwide are looking for richer means of
communications with their employees, partners, and customers, and
enterprise videoconferencing and telepresence solutions are a
natural fit," Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst for
enterprise video at Infonetics, said in a statement. "The biggest
winners in the enterprise communications market will be those who
offer solutions that are multi-modal, visual — e.g.,
video-based — and support the collaboration requirements of
globally distributed organizations."
Enterprises are adopting videoconferencing to address
visually-intensive tasks, as well as more esoteric issues,
Machowinski said in an interview.
"You know what they say about pictures and what they're worth: If
you're trying to troubleshoot something, instead of having someone
try and describe the problem, if you can see the problem you can
resolve it much faster," he said. "Some organizations are highly
virtualized where people may rarely, if ever, meet in person. If
you enable video communications, you make it easier for these folks
to have a workplace culture. People need to be comfortable with
each other to have a strong team."
Unlike sales of PBX technologies, which dropped about 20 percent
during the recession, videoconferencing product sales remained
steady in 2009, Machowinski said.
"Videoconferencing was pretty resilient. I think that's pretty
telling. Vendors at the time were saying, 'Hey, that's a way you
can reduce travel cost.' I don't know how much of a factor it is,
but I'm pretty sure it played a role at doing pretty well in the
recession," he said. "As economy improves, will companies continue
to scrutinize their travel budgets? People will continue to travel,
but they can also continue to use this to raise their productivity
levels."
Businesses increasingly are investing in the infrastructure
required to support bandwidth-hungry services such as
videoconferencing, according to ABI Research. Fiber broadband
— often used for applications such as videoconferencing and
healthcare — is the fastest-growing broadband platform, said
ABI Research's Broadband Subscribers Market Data report, released
last week.
On March 23, for example, Black Diamond Video released a Health
Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)-compliant
high-definition videoconferencing system designed for integration
within its Integrated Digital Surgical Suite or as a standalone
videoconferencing system for commercial, business, or military
organizations. The Sapphire-QHD1 includes bi-directional HD video
and audio conferencing, HD video recording, and HD image capture,
according to the developer.
"HD audio and video conferences can be initiated and accepted with
the push of a few buttons from a business conference room," said Ed
Priest, founder and CEO of Black Diamond Video, in a statement.
In fact, although some vendors are releasing desktop-based
videoconferencing systems, most revenue growth will occur in
multi-purpose room systems, according to Infonetics. Conference
room systems, typically more expensive than single-user setups, are
available from many vendors such as Avaya, Cisco-Tandberg,
Lifesize, and Polycom.
Videoconferencing vendors are differentiating their products
through price, software, and services such as the cloud.
On March 23, Polycom acquired Acordent, a developer of presentation
and webcasting management software for the enterprise, for USD 50
million. Polycom said it will use Acordent's software to enhance
its videoconferencing products.
For its part, cloud-based videoconferencing provider Nefsis on
March 24 unveiled real-time routing tables and geo-location to
reduce roundtrip latency sometimes associated with
videoconferencing and real-time sharing via the Internet. By
applying its proximity heuristics, Nefsis allocates resources in
real-time, as close to meeting participants as possible, allowing
the company to virtualize each conference at the best location,
according to Nefsis.
"The distributed nature of cloud computing brings automated load
balancing, failover, and scalability to a product category —
videoconferencing infrastructure — that has historically
required high investment for a single point of failure and only a
few ports for expansion. In other words, cloud computing is more
cost effective and easier to expand, and you get some resiliency to
boot," Allen Drennan, Nefsis chief technology officer, in a
statement.