MARKET REPORT Conferencing
Trends in Conferencing
Unified Communications and Collaboration has a lot to answer for in terms of the growth of teams-based
applications and conferencing solutions so how has this affected the market and what further impact can we
expect to see in the short term?
Conferencing has become
far more personal in
recent years with desktop,
web-based applications
readily available and sweeping
compatibility issues aside. At
the same time video and audio
conferencing has become a key
part in any team working and
collaboration application.
Facebook, Amazon, Google,
Microsoft, and to a lesser
extent Apple have all made
moves to take a bigger bite out
of the social and enterprise
video markets. How is this
impacting the business market?
According to Joel Price, Vice
President of Sales at ScanSource,
these players entering the market
have had a positive impact on the
industry. “Their strong marketing
is helping generate interest in the
various video market solutions,
but their current lack of perceived
specialism is helping some of
the more established dedicated
vendors.
Likewise, Ian Rowan, UK
Channel Manager at Wildix, says
the only impact we are seeing
is positive. “The use of these
applications, mainly for social
use with things like facetime and
hangouts is driving demand for
video within business. It used
to be that technology within
business then transitioned into
our personal lives, things like
internet, email and even printing
were initially something people
only had access to in the office.
Now people have access to these
everywhere, business adoption of
video is following social trends,
consumers are seeing and using
these video applications daily and
want them to be accessible within
the office.”
Simon Hughes, Konftel Brand
Manager at Trust Distribution,
says that the use of Apps and
their private mobile behaviour
is becoming a key feature of
working life.
“With video calls on mobiles
becoming increasingly familiar,
especially with the younger
generation, it is only natural that
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this way of communicating will
start to transfer into the business
place.
We also see within the work
place that people want hassle
free, quick and easy collaboration
and communication between
colleagues, mirroring that same
high-quality, fast, experience
they are getting outside of the
workplace among friends and
family.
These tools combined with
conferencing endpoints are
quickly becoming more popular
for employees, eliminating
lengthy email chains and
miscommunication, allowing
meetings to be set up quickly any
time any place.”
Tim Mercer, CEO of
Vapour Cloud is equally
effusive, “Without a doubt these
consumer-centric brands have
pushed conferencing to the
forefront and opened the door to
wider opportunities for video in
a business setting too. By making
video user friendly – ridiculously
simple in fact – they’ve boosted
people’s appetite for it in their
personal lives (even among the
older generation!) As a result,
people are starting to look for it
in the working environment too.
It has presented a learning
curve in the business
environment, don’t get me wrong.
But by video becoming more
mainstream, the opportunities
for savvy enterprise video apps,
are vast!”
Steven Ansell, Architecture
Lead – Collaboration Solutions at
Comstor, says there is an impact,
but so far, it’s patchy.
“Customer need rules here.
Small organisations with a
low-level conferencing need will
consider one of the app-centric
solutions for convenience and
cost. Dispersed, flexible and
smaller businesses will use
G-suite, a Jamboard and, say,
Hangouts or Zoom. However,
functionality and quality are
limited. Start to move to huddle
spaces, for example, and things
start to degrade. Plus, for many,
the convenience and speed of
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16 | Comms Business Magazine | March 2019 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
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