The market for visual collaboration managed services is expected to grow steadily through 2016, according to a new report from Frost & Sullivan. The World Collaboration Managed Services Market study shows that revenues are expected to increase from $171.3 million in 2010 to $796 million in 2016, for a compound annual growth rate of 29.2 percent.
The findings are part of the company's Conferencing and Collaboration Growth Partnership Services program. The analysis shows that the rising need for alternative means of communication among clients, partners and co-workers will contribute to growth, as well as the shift from the CAPEX to OPEX model and the increasing complexity of managing multiple visual collaboration endpoints. Growth could be restrained by a rise in automated infrastructure products and processes combined with a fall in prices, since clients will not likely pay for services they can manage themselves.
"The driving factors for visual collaboration managed services include the fact that they do not have a direct impact on client's facilities -- there is no need to purchase MCUs, gateways, etc., or on IT departments -- there is no requirement to dedicate special teams to manage the conferences," said Iwona Petruczynik, research analyst at Frost & Sullivan. "This is because all processes are outsourced to a service provider."
"A number of companies investing in visual collaboration solutions do not have the desire or resources to manage the systems themselves," added Petruczynik. "With high-end visual collaboration becoming a mission-critical component of the daily business operation, this situation creates an opportunity for service providers, as well as system integrators to deliver the visual collaboration services to clients."
If clients can lower the cost of implementing visual collaboration, it obviously becomes an appealing prospect. Added benefits are improved teamwork, accelerated decision-making processes and ease of arranging multimedia communication sessions once systems are in place. Growth is not limited to new adoption, either. Companies already using visual collaboration tools will face a challenge as they expand their offices and require an increased number of endpoints that need to be managed. Outsourcing that management to a third party offers many advantages, which will help propel the demand for such services.
"One of the major challenges that visual collaboration managed services providers face is the lack of a single solution that would allow the interoperability of all systems and endpoints coming from different vendors," said Petruczynik. "Additionally, although the telepresence and high-definition videoconferencing can run over a bandwidth 832 Kbps-1.7 Mbps, the requirements are still higher than the average. The upgrading would result in additional cost."
"Until recently, there was little interoperability between visual collaboration managed services systems that came from different vendors or operated on different networks," said Petruczynik. "Although the problem is being resolved by a number of service providers, a single solution to connect all visual collaboration session participants working on different networks and products sourced from various vendors is not currently available."
The analysis indicates visual collaboration managed service providers have a number of challenges to address before seeing widespread adoption of their services. These include generational and cultural gaps among business leaders, lack of a well-developed infrastructure that can support high-bandwidth requirements, and a rough economic climate that has resulted in limited investment capabilities from enterprises.
Edited by
Tammy Wolf
