Double-Digit Growth for Web and Video Conferencing

The last few years of turbulence and uncertainties in the world economy have changed the way the businesses are looking at managing their IT and telecom infrastructure and services. These are no more just tools that facilitate some business functions but have themselves become critical business functions managed out of the board rooms and not from server rooms. IT and telecom functions have become strategic for the business and the top management is more closely involved in decision-making in these functions than ever before. A key area of concern and importance for any large organization today is the need for an integrated unified communication strategy across the organization. It is an area which has a lot of components and typically organizations have had different providers for each of these components such as mailing, messaging, audio, and web collaboration.rnThe global unified communications (UC) market is growing at more than 25 percent year-on-year and should be a `192,000 crore (US$ 40 billion) market by the end of 2012.rnWithin the UC market, the fastest growing segment is that of collaboration services and solutions with audio, web, and video conferencing becoming central to every organization's communication needs. Every organization is focusing on deploying end-to-end solutions either on hosted (SaaS) models or on premise deployments with both options having their pros and cons.rnThe solution provider market includes large solution providers including Microsoft, WebEx, and Polycom providing web and video solutions while organizations like Arkadin are providing hosted and fully integrated audio and web conferencing solutions. The solutions provided in the market are highly scalable and adaptable to the needs of various business verticals and segments. The providers are working closely with large organizations to deliver solutions that meet the specific business needs.rnArkadin as a global collaboration provider has partnered with global players like Microsoft and WebEx in order to integrate its offerings in the audio conferencing space with their web and messaging solutions to offer end-to-end solutions to the market.rnThe Indian market has been a late starter in the unified collaboration space and is now picking up at a very fast pace with large organizations spending a lot of time and money on getting the right solutions rolled out across the board. The growth in the Indian market is across sectors and segments with BFSI, IT, and consulting being major and fastest adopters of collaboration.rnThe major growth in the last decade has been in the audio conferencing services but the next 5 years will belong to web and video conferencing with double-digit growth happening consistently across all market segments.rnArkadin is seeing the need and acceptance of quality over price when it comes to collaboration solutions and the interesting aspect in the whole space is the amount of time the top management is spending in working out the right solutions and their adoption within the organization. It is very clear that organizations have realized that the way to grow business in an ever-challenging environment is by being more efficient and UC will be a key driver of efficiencies in a global organization.