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Videoconferencing Expected to Maintain Its Historical Unit Growth Rate

Posted on: Thursday, 8 September 2005, 06:00 CDT

Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c23860) has announced the addition of Videoconferencing Clients to their offering.

Covers video conferencing endpoints including the traditional group and personal videoconferencing systems vendors plus the MPEG, software personal endpoints and telepresence sub-segments.

Major Trends & Assumptions

-- While the global economy appears to be fairly steady at this time, economic factors as a whole will have a neutral effect on the conferencing industry. A downturn in the economy generally leads to a cut in capital expenditure budgets, which hurts conferencing equipment sales, but the downturn also leads to general cuts in travel budgets, a factor which can boost conferencing service usage. The same can be said for acts of terrorism - they cause businesses to reign in their spending, but also cause people to avoid travel and use travel substitutes for business meetings. In the past four years we have seen 9/11, an abundance of terrorism, SARS, and an economic recession, but we have not seen companies flock to videoconferencing for travel avoidance or cost reduction, despite logic to the contrary. Hence the major trend here is that group videoconferencing can be expected to maintain its historical unit growth rate, while we expect the decline in average selling prices to moderate.

-- The all-in-one executive systems will establish a niche in the market representing 5-10%. All the major players now have one or more products in this space, so we think interest will grow over the next two years with exposure and with a wider range of product offerings, including more advanced integrated cameras.

-- Videoconferencing will gain some further exposure, mostly as a derivative of more attention being given to rich media conferencing and desktop collaboration products and services. More end users will be exposed to the concepts of IP Communications as IBM/Lotus, Microsoft, Avaya, Cisco, and other major enterprise vendors promote their desktop (personal videoconferencing and collaboration solutions to customers.

-- As web conferencing and instant messaging become the desktop conferencing engines of choice, and as these applications add video, enterprise personal conferencing will rapidly shift to an all-IP, all software-codec market, with gateways serving as access points to remote ISDN systems. We also think this is a few years out from having a major market impact.

-- Microsoft continues its IP communications focus around LCS and a variety of partnerships the company has formed with Polycom, TANDBERG, RADVISION, and others. We believe a major trend that Microsoft will drive is the trend to embed collaboration and visual communications within high level enterprise productivity and work flow applications. These collaboration tools will be marketed as client-server solutions.

Review of Suppliers include:

-- Aethra

-- Huawei Technologies

-- Kedacom

-- LifeSize

-- Polycom

-- Sony

-- TANDBERG

-- VCON

-- VTEL Products Corporation

-- Zoom Multimedia

-- ZTE

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c23860.

Source: Business Wire

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