Description

The global conferencing Services market experienced a growth of 4.6 percent and garnered revenues of $8.0 billion in 2016. The maturity of audio conferencing services combined with the growth of VoIP access at the expense of PSTN, and the shift from attended to automated audio conferencing compressed the demand for stand-alone audio conferencing which still constitutes the majority of overall conferencing revenues. In addition, weak economic situation and Euro currency depreciation against the US Dollar resulted in lower foreign exchange and impacted the market sentiment.

On the other hand, the cloud web and video conferencing services market experienced a healthy growth of 16 percent in 2016 owing to increased user comfort with collaborating over video, improved usability and intuitive user interfaces of video clients. The visual collaboration growth could be further attributed to the massive shift in demand from on-premises conferencing and collaboration solutions to cloud services due to the cost-effectiveness, scalability and flexibility of cloud architectures.

In 2016, audio conferencing accounted for 50.9 percent of the global conferencing services market, cloud web & video conferencing 40.1 percent, and managed video conferencing 9.0 percent, in terms of revenue. These proportions are expected to change significantly by 2023 with cloud web & video conferencing services representing 61.6 percent of total conferencing services revenue. The overall market is expected to grow gradually and reach $11 bn. at a 7-year CAGR of 4.6 percent by 2023.

The overall conferencing services market is getting increasingly commoditized due to feature parity between services provided by multiple providers. Therefore, with little feature differentiation, focusing on strengthening customer service will be critical for further growth in this market. In particular, the cloud web and video conferencing services market is a highly fragmented market fraught with a good mix of pure-play video conferencing participants; and telecom service providers reselling cloud software. Leading participants in the cloud web and video conferencing market include Cisco and LogMeIn(consolidated Join.me, Citrix GoTo and Jive portfolio). Key notable market disruptors include Zoom, BlueJeans, Fuze and Videxio.