Adam Gartenberg's Blog

Frost and Sullivan: Key Trends in Web Conferencing for 2007 and Beyond

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• Author: Adam S Gartenberg
• October 19, 2006
• Category:  Collaboration 

Over on Collaboration Loop, Melanie Tureck summarizes some of the key findings from the recent Frost & Sullivan report on Web conferencing, opening with their estimation for the size and growth of the market:  "Valued at $725.4 million in 2005, we forecast the market will reach $2.9 billion in 2011." (That's a 25.9% compound annual growth rate.)

Some other things from her post that jumped out at me:

• Unified Communications. Companies are starting to get seriously interested in tying all their communications technologies together....
• Enterprise Deployments. Traditionally, web conferencing has been sold at the departmental level. It’s not unusual in large enterprises to find a dozen vendors supplying web conferencing services to one group or another. That’s changing, as IT gets involved in the decision-making and purchasing process....
• On-Net Applications vs. Hosted Services. As more companies deploy web conferencing as part of an overall UC strategy, and as they look to do so enterprise-wide, they are moving away from using hosted services to installing and managing web conferencing applications on the network....

They did find, and I do agree, that hosted services will continue to have a place in this market, but I think it's interesting to see them validating the same trends we are seeing - that collaborative tools like Web conferencing are reaching the attention of senior levels of IT, that they are making enterprise-wide decisions on it, and are often choosing to roll it out, manage it and especially integrate it as a core part of their infrastructure.

Link:  Key Trends in Web Conferencing for 2007 and Beyond

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