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Research and Markets: World Videoconferencing Infrastructure Markets 2010 - Converged Solutions Buoy Prospects for the Wor

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Posted November 9, 2010

DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/2a84b6/world_videoconfere) has announced the addition of Frost & Sullivan's new report "World Videoconferencing Infrastructure Markets" to their offering.

Market Defies Economic Slowdown As Video Moves Mainstream

This strategic analysis is part of Frost & Sullivan's continued coverage of the conferencing and collaboration marketplace. Within this analysis, Frost & Sullivan has identified industry challenges, market drivers, restraints, competitive landscape, revenues, market shares and key market trends within the World videoconferencing infrastructure market. With extensive primary and secondary research, this analysis provides videoconferencing vendors with a detailed look at the current and changing dynamics in the fast evolving videoconferencing infrastructure marketplace.

Research Overview

This Frost & Sullivan research service titled World Videoconferencing Infrastructure Markets provides vendors with insights to expand their footprint and maximize penetration within the emerging unified communications (UC) marketplace. The scope of this research includes vendors that offer videoconferencing bridges, gateways, gatekeepers, as well as management and scheduling software.

Market Overview

The world videoconferencing infrastructure markets are poised to continue on the high-growth trajectory, as organizations are deploying videoconferencing not only as a means to cut travel cost in times of economic downturn, but also as a personal enabler for team collaboration within an enterprise. Videoconferencing has also witnessed huge uptake, as it facilitates rich engagements with partners, suppliers, and customers. Conferencing technologies are quickly evolving from siloed to converged solutions where data, voice, and video, presence, secure instant messaging, unified messaging, as well as voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) are merging. When tightly integrated, the combined suite is called a UC solution. Enterprise video technologies that are attracting the most attention from the market are room-based videoconferencing, mobile video, video streaming, and personal/team collaboration. Following in the footsteps of other conferencing markets, the videoconferencing infrastructure systems market is also undergoing transformation in product features, functionality, and end user needs as it evolves into a key element in implementing unified communications solutions. Demand for videoconferencing infrastructure is getting closely tied to the growth in HD endpoints and telepresence, notes the analyst of this research service. Today, a vast majority of videoconferencing deployments are happening over IP networks, creating seamless interconnectivity between H.323 and SIP-based networks as well as legacy Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) networks.

Although the outlook for the market is bright, there are some challenges curtailing forward momentum. Buyer power in the market is somewhat diluted due to increased consolidation, proprietary systems, evolving interoperability between different vendor products, and lack of choice. However, end users are not short of options with regard to deployment models - be it on-premises, on-premises with outsourced managed services, co-location, or a purely cloud-based hosted model. As restrained spending becomes the new norm for enterprises, videoconferencing vendors will continue to face price pressure. In 2009, all the key vendors reported offering of price discounts to bolster sales. Bundling infrastructure and endpoints has also led to pricing discounts. Though vendors continue to diversify the feature sets of multipoint control units (MCUs), the videoconferencing infrastructure market is bound to witness sustained pricing pressure during the short and medium terms.

Videoconferencing and UC vendors are resorting to partnerships to make their products interoperable and targeting enterprises that are eyeing a combination of collaboration options. As video gets more tightly integrated with other collaboration platforms, it will accelerate market growth and help reach critical mass faster. A major outcome of mergers and acquisitions will be broader interoperability in the industry. The market is seeing a fair amount of polarization subsequent to Cisco's acquisition of TANDBERG, says the analyst. Cisco itself sees the acquisition as critical to succeeding in the UC marketplace. In the past, use of videoconferencing in the enterprise was limited to room-based systems. These systems require dedicated network connectivity and usage was limited to intra-company sessions due to lack of interoperability. Vendors, however, are striving to address interoperability concerns. Cisco Systems, Inc. for instance, has released its proprietary telepresence protocol in the public domain and is moving forward to make this into an industry standard, paving the way for an open architecture that takes interoperability beyond just telepresence to include any third-party videoconferencing system.

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