Webconferencing: Sunshine ahead

MUMBAI: The increasing recognition of real-time collaboration as a key enabler of business performance has lead to organizations prioritizing technology investments in real time collaboration tools, including Web conferencing, to enhance productivity and reduce costs. Driven by this, the worldwide Web conferencing markets are likely to see considerable growth in the coming years, in the process offering major growth opportunity for real time collaboration and unified communications vendors.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan www.conferencingandcollaboration.frost.com), World Web Conferencing Markets, reveals that revenues in this market totaled $725.4 million in 2005, and is likely to reach $2.90 billion in 2011.

"A growing ground swell of demand for online collaboration continues to fuel growth in the global Web conferencing market," notes Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Roopam Jain. "A broadening base of applications, improved user friendliness, and greater affordability are all working together to help Web conferencing establish itself as a ubiquitous tool that is part of everyday business communications."

Moreover, Web conferencing vendors are utilizing new growth opportunities to extend the reach of the technology from departmental adoption to organization wide deployments. Innovative ways to deliver Web conferencing are also on the rise. Integration of Web conferencing with the core of business intelligence and applications and its integration with instant messaging (IM), voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), video conferencing, and groupware is becoming the major focus of vendors in this market.

However, more often that not, large enterprises today use multiple Web conferencing solutions for different departments. In changing this trend, vendors are pushing for enterprise-wide solutions, but face the challenge of convincing the end users of not only the value of Web-conferencing as an enterprise-wide communications tool, but also the superiority of their solutions over other vendors' solutions that the organization may be using already. Developing such enterprise-wide adoption significantly increases not only the sales cycle, but also the cost per sale.

"An added challenge for vendors lies in developing open architectures that fully interoperate with communication tools from other vendors," says Jain. "Web conferencing vendors have to constantly analyze their product architecture practices to look for open source alternatives that can enhance their enterprise architecture goals (for example, improved functionality, cost reduction, increased flexibility, greater control, and ability to scale)."

Going forward, the weaving of Web conferencing into the framework of business applications and business intelligence will drive adoption of Web conferencing in mainstream applications. While there is always room for truly innovative products, it is this integration along with ease of use and pricing that will be key differentiators in the future. Areas with maximum growth potential include addressing new regions, verticalized solutions, and integrated applications.

Source: CIOL Bureau