The Bigger Picture

Analyst reports on the "videoconferencing market" misrepresent the global opportunity for video sales into the enterprise claims VQ's business development director, Giles Adams (@GilesAdamsVQ).

I take issue with the headline that accompanied IDC's latest videoconferencing and telepresence market-sizing report. "Worldwide Enterprise Videoconferencing and Telepresence Market Sees Continued Weakness in First Quarter of 2013" is typical of the prevailing but ultimately misleading trend for implying that declining hardware sales mean videoconferencing as a struggling concept.

It's true, the hardware that IDC has based its report on - endpoints, including multi-codec immersive telepresence, single-codec telepresence, and personal videoconferencing - aren't flying off the shelves at the moment.

But to say that this equates to a weak videoconferencing market doesn't sit comfortably with me, because the market is quickly moving to a position where it won't be defined by hardware sales but instead by usage volumes and delivery formats. In the vanguard of this movement is unified communications, which is driving a massive uplift in video usage for business, and some other very nimble and exciting companies integrating video into all kinds of communications applications.

I can see why analysts like to define the videoconferencing market in terms of Polycom and Cisco. It feels like they have been inextricably linked to the sector almost since day one and, until recently, its overall health. I can also see why they would use the headlines they do - they need to attract readers.

However, it is my belief that the hardware bubble is at bursting point and we're now at an "Emperor's new clothes" moment, where its relevance to the future of videoconferencing in the enterprise is questionable.

Video doesn't sit in isolation anymore. Videoconferencing has left the rarefied atmosphere of the telepresence suite to come and play with some of the business communications industry's most exciting up-and-comers.

Anyone who was at InfoComm this year will have come across the companies now shaping video's place in the enterprise.

At the latest gathering of the industry's great and good, disruptive new players offering solutions that enable massive scalability and impressive levels of integration with legacy systems (both voice and video), such as Acano and Pexip, were out in force, and unified communications, WebRTC and browser-based video enabled by HTML5, were the trends given the most air time.

Videoconferencing's future is with solutions that enable better scaling, higher usage and improved convenience. And what do the aforementioned companies or trends have in common? They can all be discussed almost without mentioning hardware at all. They will also drive up video usage massively without forcing any significant uptick in the hardware sales measured by analysts.

In my opinion, it's clear that anyone too focussed on developing endpoints will see their influence on the market's future dwindle sharply, and to be fair to IDC it does allude to this: "...we still see video adoption being driven by interest in doing video integrations with vendor UC&C portfolios and business processes, as well as the increasing use of video collaboration for small workgroup, desktop, and mobile users." (It's actually buried three quarters of the way down the announcement.) Yet this makes the insistence on using hardware sales as an industry barometer all the more frustrating.

Endpoints of course still have a part to play in the future of videoconferencing: companies with large investments will still want to use their telepresence systems and will be eager to see how they can be made to work better with new usage models.

But a true market reflection requires an analysis that includes the aforementioned solutions as well as managed service providers from BT to Blue Jeans, Zoom to Providea.

The upshot is that usage of videoconferencing is growing. But rather than buying new equipment, enterprises are focussed on making existing systems work harder, which invariably means turning to software that can make the experience more reliable and users more productive. This is where we have tried to position ourselves, and where the channel should try to position itself, while at the same time promoting self-service solutions as another mechanism to meet the age old demand for video to be easier to use.

I see a new cycle emerging in the market where reliability drives up usage substantially at which point new purchases can be justified - but whether they will be solutions from the established players or the "young Turks" at Acano or Pexip remains to be seen.

The videoconferencing market is not "weak," instead I believe the opposite is true and we're actually entering a very exciting new phase. I see a buoyant market that is moving with end-user demand for unified solutions, not following the older manufacturers' product-led attempts to influence its direction.

Giles Adams is Director at VQ Communications and a developer of video management software that assists with reliable integrations between UC/collaboration solutions and enterprise room-based or mobile video systems.