Video Collaboration Continues to be the Main Pillar Behind Industry Growth
The global conferencing services market continues to offer significant growth opportunities for conferencing and collaboration service providers.
While stand-alone audio conferencing services were greatly impacted in 2017, mainly due to the growing popularity of tightly integrated audio and video conferencing services, video-related conferencing services continued to grow triggered by the increased acceptance of video collaboration in the workspace.
Revenue from stand-alone audio conferencing services decreased by 9.9 percent in 2017. Stand-alone audio conferencing services will continue to be impacted by price compression; user migration to cloud web and video conferencing services with integrated audio; and increased proliferation of all-in-one unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) solutions.
Cloud web and video conferencing services revenue grew 12.1 percent in 2017. Continued growth in cloud web and video conferencing services can be largely attributed to increasing user comfort with video collaboration, improved overall offering and affordable prices. The demand for robust and engaging digital environments to meet and collaborate on increasingly complex business objectives will continue to grow over time. IT departments around the world increasingly accept the flexibility derived from cloud communications and collaboration deployment models as opposed to on-premises components. The changing demographics in the workplace combined with technology advancements for the portability and reduced cost of delivering video is making rich interaction with groups over audio and video with content sharing nearly as mainstream and ubiquitous as audio-only conversations.
Managed video conferencing services grew by 4.9 percent in 2017. Key drivers that will contribute to the growth of managed video conferencing services include greater requirements for remote monitoring and management of the meeting solutions ecosystem (beyond the conferencing infrastructure); the growing ecosystem of conferencing endpoints and devices need to outfit open meeting spaces and huddle rooms, and overall managed video conferencing portfolio enhancements.
In 2017, stand-alone audio conferencing accounted for 51.0 percent of the global conferencing services market, cloud web and video conferencing 38.7 percent, and managed video conferencing 10.3 percent, in terms of revenue. These proportions are expected to significantly change by 2024 with cloud web and video conferencing services growing to represent 76.8 percent of total global conferencing services revenue.
