Our friends at Wainhouse Research have released a new report projecting major growth in the videoconferencing market over the next five years. If you want to understand why that's happening, I'd refer you to this No Jitter feature by Brent Kelly of Wainhouse.
Our friends at Wainhouse Research have released a new report projecting major growth in the videoconferencing market over the next five years. If you want to understand why that's happening, I'd refer you to this No Jitter feature by Brent Kelly of Wainhouse.Of all the numbers cited in the new Wainhouse report, I find the 21% annual growth for telepresence to be the most impressive, even though Wainhouse projects even bigger growth (50%) for "personal" videoconferencing, based largely on Unified Communications adoption. Telepresence is still a huge investment for an enterprise, so even growing off a relatively small base, 20+% growth is noteworthy.
This is a big win for Cisco, on two fronts. A lot of folks, myself included, were pretty skeptical that a lot of enterprises would plunk down a quarter of a million dollars for a single telepresence room, and it seemed, in any case, like something that would be a niche market at best. Of course there are other telepresence vendors in addition to Cisco, but among communications platform vendors, Cisco thought outside the box with telepresence, and the bet appears to be paying off.
The Wainhouse numbers are for unit shipments, rather than revenues, but I haven't seen much indication that telepresence prices are going to drop dramatically.
Of course the other big win for Cisco is that telepresence is a bandwidth hog and an IP QOS challenge, as John Bartlett has been writing for the past several weeks. John's latest headline says it all--"Telepresence May Require Router and Switch Upgrades."
Cisco's telepresence push has inspired some pushback from other vendors, most notably Microsoft; at VoiceCon Orlando 2008, Gurdeep Singh Pall mocked the physical sitework required to make telepresence rooms match one another to complete the immersive experience: "What's next folks?" Gurdeep said of Cisco. "Are they going to be supplying tables and chairs to you? Are they going to be selling you the buildings? Actually, they already are with TelePresence."
Microsoft's answer is Roundtable, the 360-degree conference-table based camera that automatically switches the image it's broadcasting to whichever person is speaking at the time. Microsoft also supports the desktop model, which as Wainhouse notes, stands to grow significantly with the adoption of UC portals like Microsoft Communicator/Office Communications server.
The answer, of course, is that there's room for both models of video communications. And as Wainhouse Research suggests, there's plenty of room for everyone to grow.
