Asia Pacific conferencing and collaboration: Shifting into higher gear 
Yen Yen Har
15/07/2008

A glimpse into 2007
The year 2007 proved to be an eventful year for conferencing and collaboration. It witnessed a phenomenal series of developments and transformations, which in turn stimulated the Asia Pacific conferencing market. Not only did the market mature in developing a wider range of solutions, it also made a leap in the real-time collaboration space, as evident through the mergers and acquisitions and various strategic partnerships. The industry underwent a period of significant consolidation and rationalisation with a spate of acquisitions, notably by Cisco, IBM, and AT&T. While the market consolidated further in the conferencing services space, competition in the visual communication space intensified as more competitors entered the telepresence market.

The adoption of conferencing and collaboration has gained much momentum in the Asia Pacific region on the back of business globalisation. Beyond all doubt, the impact of the changing business environment from a centralised to a distributed enterprise and virtual teams raises the importance of staying connected. Investments in the Asia Pacific increased steadily, with a burgeoning investor appetite for businesses in China and India. Such a situation, coupled with the eagerness of local corporations to spread their wings into other markets within or outside the Asia Pacific and rising global competition in a more deregulated business environment push forward the usage of conferencing to enhance communication, collaboration, and business efficiency in all aspects (productivity, decision-making, and speed-to-market).

State of the conferencing services and equipment markets
Increased business activities in the Asia Pacific are well reflected through the sturdy growth in both conferencing services and minutes. Though the overwhelming bulk of the revenues comes from audio conferencing, the demand for web-conferencing services is growing substantially, while videoconferencing services is returning to healthy growth after years of diminishing demand. The integration of audio, video, and web technologies into a single conferencing platform is becoming more obvious. In fact, leading service providers have gone the extra mile to integrate conferencing with other business applications.

On the videoconferencing equipment front, high definition (HD) is gaining unprecedented attention, and is moving into mainstream adoption. With a declining price trend in HD and better interoperability between HD and standard definition (SD), as well as improved cost and availability of bandwidth, more organisations shift to IP-based videoconferencing, which in turn translates into higher growth of HD videoconferencing.

There has also been a rapidly developing buzz around telepresence, amplified further by strong marketing activities of HP and Cisco. Rather than mere hype, telepresence appears now to be gaining strong interest and demand from many people in senior positions, from large organisations across the verticals as well as from various agencies in the government sector. The solution is also gaining favour among service providers. Some of the major service providers who have deployed telepresence for internal use are extending it to customers as a managed service.

Evolution of the market
The overall competitive landscape of conferencing is evolving rapidly. The future is expected to see the market expanding to include not only solutions from the traditional conferencing vendors, but also converged conferencing providers as well as unified communications application vendors, from both, the telephony and data communications spaces. With the conferencing landscape changing, the market is becoming more converged for audio, video, and web-conferencing, through unified communication and collaborative solutions.

Organisations are beginning to realise that effective collaboration and communication is a key driver of overall business performance. Understanding this need, vendors and service providers are expected to place higher weightage behind real-time collaboration and unified communication with conferencing increasingly becoming an integral component in their solution offerings. As the world continues to flatten, this helps to unlock further the potential within the conferencing market of the Asia Pacific.

The pace of adoption is expected to solidify over the next few years. Increased adoption is foreseeable, not only at the large enterprise level, but also from small and medium-sized businesses toward conferencing services as well as from C-level executives across verticals in favour of telepresence. Segments such as web-conferencing services, videoconferencing equipment, and web-conferencing software, as well as telepresence, are expected to continue to portray strong double to triple-digit growth rates due to their infancy stage.

While growing awareness, business globalisation, interest in HD and telepresence, real-time collaboration, and the other aforementioned trends and factors could continue to shape and drive the Asia Pacific conferencing market, the emerging trend to adopt ‘green IT’ is expected to play a more influential role than before in spurring the market demand, moving forward. As such, more corporations are expected to leverage their conferencing, be it from a monetary standpoint, corporate social responsibility agenda or from a branding aspect. In addition, the uptake from government and non-government organisations is expected to grow in tandem with the pressure to curb carbon emissions.

Conclusion
The conferencing and collaboration market is indeed making much headway in the Asia Pacific. The year 2007 was quite eventful, but 2008 is anticipated to be a landmark year with greater adoption intensity, as the market witnesses a shift in the customer perception of conferencing and collaboration to a more positive mindset. Unlike in previous years, when vendors and service providers faced tremendous barriers in securing deals and showing return on investment (ROI), the greater awareness of the use of conferencing as a business productivity and collaboration tool, as well as to replace expensive travel and reduce carbon footprint, is undeniable, paving a smoother path for the market.

- Yen Yen Har is a senior industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan

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