I recently read an interesting article by Larry Dignan at Zdnet which discussed a slump in sales of hardware-based video conferencing systems. Larry quotes findings from analysts IDC, who found that “sales of video conferencing equipment in the first quarter fell 15.9 percent compared to a year ago. Global enterprise video equipment revenue in the first quarter was $473.5 million and units sold fell 6.2 percent from a year ago.” Larry suggests that this slump in hardware sales is due to a switch to cloud-based video conferencing as a service (VCaaS), saying that these hardware-based system providers are being hit by “a big can of whoop ass” by software and cloud-based collaboration tools. He is joined by other industry voices, including Wayne Mason, who states in this article on TechRadar that VCaaS is an emerging force, allowing companies to make use of video conferencing without the infrastructure and maintenance costs.
While it’s not surprising that there is a slump in hardware sales relating to video conferencing, the data doesn’t seem to indicate that this decline is due to a corresponding increase in VCaaS. The overall value of the VCaaS market has increased from $135m in 2012 to $150m in 2013, with a projected value of $185m for 2014 (Wainhouse, April 2014). This is a decent increase in percentage terms, but it’s still a tiny part of the overall video conferencing market.
As is so often the case with video conferencing, there’s a lot of hype. The familiar refrain of ‘this is the year of video conferencing’ has simply been replaced with ‘this is the year of VCaaS’, without the evidence to back it up.
In fact, I believe that the slump in hardware-based video conferencing systems, and indeed the still small market for VCaaS, can be explained not only by the usual factors that Steve Flavell has discussed in the past – complexity of setup, interoperability issues and high costs – but because everyday conferencing users fundamentally don’t have a use case for video on the majority of their calls.
The fact is that most people on conference calls just don’t want to be videoed, especially on everyday calls when they may be peripheral to the action. While there are certainly business use cases in which video conferencing is very useful – interviews spring to mind, for example – these specialist use cases are greatly outnumbered by the everyday meeting use cases. On these calls – the daily team meeting, the weekly project call – it is neither useful nor desirable for participants to be on video, especially those participants who are on many such calls a day, and not central to the action on them all.
Until people actively want to be videoed for these everyday calls, the industry will struggle to reach the level of adoption they hope to reach, no matter how many hurdles VCaaS may claim to remove in terms of simplification, compatibility, and cost. Until that day, I’ll be watching the market with interest, and taking video conferencing supporters’ claims with a pinch of salt.
