Leading Analyst Firms Forecast Increased Spending on Video Conferencing

Global analyst firms have identified an uptick in video conferencing spending, as SMBs and enterprises embrace the benefits of real-time visual communications technologies. Infonetics predicts enterprises will spend $5 billion on videoconferencing and telepresence systems by 2015, and Frost & Sullivan forecasts the Web conferencing and collaboration market will reach $4.12 billion by 2014.

Video conferencing software developer Nefsis has seen its product mix shift from 50% on-premise in 2008 to 90% cloud-based software-as-a-service delivery today, and as a result, predicts an increasing role played by cloud-based solutions in the then and there few years. To assist companies in the decision-making process, Nefsis has identified the critical elements businesses should evaluate when deploying video conferencing to get the maximum cloud-enabled benefits.

"Cloud computing and video conferencing are more popular than ever, however there are fundamental differences that set the leading cloud-based solutions apart," said Tom Toperczer, Nefsis Vice President of Marketing. "Be sure to look for multiple points of presence and real-time, distributed workload balancing - a centralized data center or a single hosted video router is not specifically in the spirit or technical meaning of the word 'cloud.'"

A globally distributed network of servers that reacts in real-time to conference events and network conditions power the automated load-balancing, fail-over, and high-scalability benefits of cloud computing, elaborated Company officials.

"SMBs today are looking for enterprise-class communication capabilities like high-quality video conferencing, at a price they can afford. Taking the cloud approach is a great way to provide these capabilities, however not all cloud video conferencing solutions are the same," stated Robert Poe, Principal Analyst at VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Evolution and author of the recently released report SMB Video Conferencing: Getting Beyond Clouds & Interoperability.

"To be actually useful, cloud-based video conferencing solutions have to perform then even over unreliable network connections, and offer sophisticated collaboration tools just in case to video conferencing," added Poe.

Headquartered in San Diego, California, Nefsis is a research specialist in video conferencing software and cloud computing online services. The Company's global cloud provides multipoint HD video and advanced collaboration tools to business, government and educational clients in more than 45 countries worldwide. As compared to previous generations of infrastructure hardware solutions just as video routers, MCUs and gateways, the Nefsis cloud-based offering is less expensive, automatically maintained, and easier to expand.