With the economic downturn hitting markets across the world, the pressure to cut down on expensive travel is evident through the rise in use of conferencing services and technologies, said research house Ovum.
In the Asia Pacific region, the advisory firm predicted video conferencing revenues to grow from US$236 million to an astounding US$360 million. In North America the market growth for audio conferencing is slowing, and as a result of competitive audio conferencing tariffs revenues have suffered.
As video and audio services enable users to access audio, web and video services via one web portal when collaborating at work, it is expected that demand will grow, said Ovum. With the use of desktop video, companies are now able to efficiently reach more customers without having to face the need to travel, the research house added.
However, Ovum stated that there is faster growth in emerging markets due to wider organic adoption. Although web conferencing hasn't been adopted as readily as expected, Ovum forecast the demand for integrated conferencing to be significantly larger in five years, growing from US$63 million in 2007 to US$480 million in 2012, and that the most significant volume growth in video conferencing markets will increase from US$923 million in 2007 to US$1879 million in 2012.
Community Comments