Europe's video conferencing market grows 20%

The European market for video conferencing has grown 20 percent in the past year, topping $518 million in revenues during 2010, according to a Frost & Sullivan report citing a reduction in business travel as a main driver. In addition, Frost & Sullivan predict that the growth is likely to continue as video conferencing moves deeper into SMBs.

At least one European vendor, meanwhile, said it saw a silver lining in a cloud--the ash cloud from Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano that grounded air traffic in northern Europe in May 2010. It said inquiries about video conferencing jumped 180 percent during the disruption.

And U.K. vendor Regus says it's still seeing growth a year after the event and believes it helped European businesses commit to video conferencing.

"It taught businesses that video communication can replace time-consuming and costly air travel," said Celia Donne, Regus' regional director. "At a time when companies of all sizes want to cut travel costs and shrink their carbon footprint, why spend money on flights abroad when they can achieve the same results at a nearby video communication studio?"

Research firm Frost & Sullivan agrees.

"The need for companies to reduce their travel cost while maintaining communication with their workers and clients will drive the European video conferencing endpoints market," said Iwona Petruczynik, research analyst at Frost & Sullivan, adding, "Increasingly stringent environment policies imposed by the European Parliament will also promote market development."

The hurdles facing adoption in Europe mirror those in the U.S., specifically the difficulty of attaching a hard-dollar ROI to the benefits of visual communications, which continue to prevent large-scale investments. The effort needed in changing established work behaviors  was also cited as an issue.

For more:
- see this release
- see this Fresh Business Thinking article

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