Enterprise Telepresence and Videoconferencing Forecast

 If you're like many multinational business leaders today, then your company exists within a complex network of vendors, customers and other collaborators. This business ecosystem is as vital to you as your employees and intellectual property. Keeping it healthy helps you maintain and grow your market share, navigate challenging economic conditions, and explore new business opportunities.

In many commercial scenarios, conducting international business and staying in touch with all your key stakeholders requires regular face-to-face communications. But sometimes you can accomplish your personal interaction objectives without the need to travel to distant places.

Infonetics Research released its current Enterprise Telepresence and Video Conferencing report, which provides insight and analysis of dedicated videoconference infrastructure and endpoints -- which includes the latest immersive telepresence applications.

Collaborating in a Global Distributed Organization

"Communicating via video continues to be one of the top trends, as evidenced by strong growth in the enterprise video market. Businesses worldwide are looking for richer means of communications with their employees, partners, and customers, and enterprise videoconferencing and telepresence solutions are a natural fit," said Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst for enterprise networks and video at Infonetics Research.

According to the findings from their latest market study, Infonetics says they believe that the biggest winners in the enterprise communications market will be those who offer solutions that are multi-modal, visual (video-based), and support the collaboration requirements of globally distributed organizations.

 Highlights of the Infonetics market study include:

• Annual enterprise video conferencing and telepresence system revenue grew 18 percent in 2010 to $2.2 billion worldwide.
• Infonetics expects the enterprise video conferencing and telepresence market to more than double by 2015, when it will reach $5.0 billion.
• Due to their versatility, multi-purpose room systems account for the majority of enterprise video conferencing equipment.
• Immersive telepresence systems are expected to have the highest growth rates of all video conferencing equipment.
• Based upon their low cost and availability on PBXs, software-based endpoints out-ship hardware by 10:1
• The acquisition of Tandberg propelled Cisco to the top position – based on the overall enterprise video conferencing market, with 50 percent of revenue in 2010.
• Polycom maintains its second position for revenue, and leads for units shipped.

Public and Private Clouds for the Enterprise

Telecommunication service providers will likely consume their own cloud services. After all, every organization can gain something from the proven benefits of infrastructure and application out-tasking. However, their primary role will be to implement and deliver the services that their end-customers will seek from public, virtual private, and hybrid clouds.

Service providers have the opportunity to extend their current offerings, which may already include hosting, communications, media, and software application services. Moreover, cloud offerings enable service providers to extend their reach beyond their traditional areas of operation.

That said, service providers must be prepared to address customer concerns ranging from policy compliance, to end-to-end security, to quality of service management, and to technical customization. They must be able to deliver a flexible range of functionality, service levels, and payment models.

Enterprise Cloud Use-Case Scenario

• Many enterprise-focused service providers (SPs) have an opportunity to create higher-value, differentiated service offerings. They have unique capabilities they can leverage, including customer relationships, physical assets, and extensive operations experience.
• At the same time, over-the-top services (such as Skype VoIP) threaten traditional SP revenue streams (e.g., wireline and mobile voice services). So, SPs have an incentive to evolve their value-add capabilities.

Role for Cloud Technologies

• Cloud is unlocking huge growth potential through new service offerings (e.g., infrastructure as a service, collaboration as a service).
• SPs offering cloud services have several avenues of differentiation in terms of deployment models (e.g., public cloud, virtual private cloud, hybrid cloud) and service types (e.g., infrastructure, collaboration).
• A cloud-ready architecture can also reduce an SP’s overall cost of delivery through more efficient and sustainable infrastructure platforms.

Application Considerations

• As table-stakes, SPs offering cloud services must ensure security and isolation of customer data in a multi-tenant environment. They must also offer a comprehensive suite of basic services (e.g., voice, collaboration).
• Initial customer acquisition will be driven by distinctive solutions with differentiated services and end-to-end service level agreements (SLAs).
• Over the long term, SPs must be able to deliver cost-effective services with viable margins.

While large enterprises also see tangible benefits in using public clouds, we expect private and hybrid cloud models to be very common. Large enterprises may use public clouds for burst or peak capacity and for select services that are difficult to scale themselves.

However, these organizations often require a higher degree of control over their data, applications, and systems than current public clouds allow. At scale, a private cloud offers the efficiency and agility of a public cloud -- without the loss of control.

Still, the IT services that a pure private cloud can offer are often limited to what internal IT can develop or deploy. This is where managed cloud service providers can add value.