The leaders in the space continue to be Cisco (44.8%) and Polycom (23%) with Huawei showing strong growth in sales in the Asia and Latin America. Over the last two years Cisco has seen its market share rise while Polycom has seen a decline from its high of 35%.
The value proposition of video conferencing remains. Reduce travel and cut down cost of airfare, lodging and lost productivity. Improve communication and collaboration between organizations and geographically disperse employees. Environmentally, a recent study on human-to-human communication noted that driving an hour to participate in meeting uses the equivalent power consumption of 1000 video conferencing hours. Finally, live, video meetings provide participants much more visual information where facial expressions and body language can be used to better interpret meeting communications.
Video conferencing and telepresence provide other benefits as well and it is the collection of these that will keep video from faltering as it did in the 1990s. Enterprises will continue to expand their implementation of SIP Trunks and IP infrastructures to support telepresence and create special rooms. SMBs will continue to look to application service providers and carriers to build the necessary facilities and tools to support low-end video solutions. As these infrastructures are completed and cost begins to drop, demand will grow. May 2013 be better than 2012.
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