Web Conferencing Resources

Growth in the Video and Web Conferncing Services among SMBs

November 30, 2008 – 8:10 am

A recent study conducted by AMI-Partners suggests that small to medium sized business in the global conferencing market, including voice, video and web conferencing services is expected to grow at a steady 5.9 per cent compound annual growth rate through to 2012, bringing the revenue to $2.6 billion in 2012, compared to the $1.8 billion on 2006. However this combined value of these conferencing services can be misleading as the audio conferencing market is expected to continue at its 4.3 percent annual while video conferencing is expected to grow at 8.5 percent and web conferencing at 10.5 percent.AMI-Partners Vice President, Sanjeev Aggarawal:

Out of those, the audio one is lower growth, but the Web and video have some pretty healthy growth

While small businesses have been using audio conferencing for quite some time, many are slowly switching to include video conferencing and online collaboration through web conferencing services. This technology is still fairly new to many of these smaller sized companies, but in light of increased travel expenses are becoming more attractive.

One of the most important drivers for the adoption of videoconferencing and Web conferencing by SMBs is the increase in performance of networks, which makes it possible to run the applications reliably and without losing video quality. In the last few years prices for high speed networks have come down dramatically. Videoconferencing and Web conferencing solutions have also come down in price enough that they’re affordable by SMBs.

The study also indicated that small businesses up to 99 employees showed a prefernce for using hosted solutions, such as InstantPresenter, while medium businesses (100-999 employees) seemd to show a prefernce for both hosted and on premise conferencing solutions.