Telepresence and Video Conferencing Industry

The enterprise telepresence and video conferencing industry includes both appliance-based and software-based endpoints and infrastructure for telepresence, group systems, executive desktop systems, and software-based personal systems. Combined, this creates a market that is over $2 billion in annual revenue, and plays an integral role in a much larger collaboration market.

Today, there are approximately one million installed telepresence and video conferencing endpoints in businesses of all types and sizes, as well as governments, universities, financial institutions, and hospitals.

Over three-quarters of the appliance-based video endpoints market today consists of single-codec group systems, with multi-codec immersive telepresence systems and executive desktop systems making up the remainder.

Over the last five years the video conferencing industry has experienced
tremendous growth.

The overall enterprise telepresence and video conferencing market is projected to grow 15% annually over the next five years to reach $4.3B in 2014.

1. Economic Pressures – increasing need to be more efficient, cut costs, and communicate with customers, partners and suppliers around the world.
2. Globalization – not only are enterprises today managing trade across borders and outsourcing certain business functions, they also have dispersed management teams and skill sets, which lead to increased challenges for corporate culture and communication. With business flowing in all directions, enterprises have become globally integrated, stateless multinationals.
3. Business Continuity – concern for threats such as global contagion, energy crises, and terrorism are on the rise, and business needs to be sure it can maintain operations.
4. Better Equipment – technological advances in the industry have led to a better user experience with CD quality audio and HD quality video, as well as increased collaboration with dual streams, integration, and bridges and gatekeepers. Meanwhile prices have remained relatively flat and users benefit from a better price per performance.
5. Unified Communications – integration between large unified communications players and video has driven awareness of conferencing and collaboration.
6. Climate Change – social pressures and corporate responsibility policies are driving the need to reduce travel to lower carbon emissions. As government mandates and rewards for travel reduction grow, organizations will increasingly turn to video conferencing.

Contributed by Andrew W. Davis, Wainhouse Research