With vendors pushing collaboration technologies and external factors predicted to fuel market growth, channel players predict demand for telepresence and conferencing could be set to explode.

Analyst Frost & Sullivan recently forecast that the telepresence and videoconferencing market would swell to an annual global worth of $4.7bn (£2.7bn) by 2014. Growth will be fuelled by high-quality products, the declining cost of broadband and business chiefs’ desire to minimise travel costs, the research firm said.

Gartner is another market watcher to forecast a boom in telepresence take-up. The analyst predicted that high-definition video telepresence will be responsible for the loss of 2.1 million airline seats per year, costing the travel and hospitality industry an annual $3.5bn.

Immersive experience

Services specialist 5i runs sales training courses for resellers moving into the telepresence space. Director of training services Anna Guest claimed it was important to draw the distinction between telepresence and videoconferencing.

“Telepresence is a really immersive experience and is fundamentally different to videoconferencing or web collaboration,” she said. “One of the challenges it faces comes from people who want to sell video conferencing and claim telepresence is just a fancier version.”

Guest claimed the training had proved a hit and its popularity was starting to filter down to smaller VARs.

“To date it has mostly been the larger integrators,” she said. “But we are now rolling out to some of the smaller players who work on a national, rather than an international, basis.”

The Global Telepresence Market report from ABI Research, published earlier this year, predicted that the market for managed telepresence services will be worth more than $360m in 2011.

The report stated that telepresence’s cost, coupled with technology interoperability issues, had so far proved prohibitive to all firms outside of the large enterprise arena. But a managed or on-demand model could drive take-up at SME and even consumer level, ABI claimed.

Stan Schatt, ABI’s vice president, said: “Take a small business that has a supply chain relationship with an Asian company. The fee for an hour in a telepresence room is always going to be less than the cost of sending a key executive all the way to China. And fewer air miles are better for the environment.”

Traditional audio, web and video conferencing technologies are also still enjoying healthy demand, according to more Frost & Sullivan research. The Western European Conferencing Services Market report, published this summer, projects that the region’s market worth will more than double by 2014.

Last year, revenue from conferencing services in Western Europe was $1.12bn and Frost & Sullivan predicts this will grow to $2.31bn in 2014. The analyst claims UK demand for audio and web conferencing kit will remain strong for the foreseeable future.

Reducing business travel

Telecoms distributor Nimans recently entered the video conferencing fray by taking stock of vendor Polycom’s QDX 6000 model. The Salford-based firm claims entry-level video technology is still appealing for comms resellers.

Ian Brindle, head of conferencing sales at Nimans, said: “Resellers do not have to be officially accredited or have an in-depth technical knowledge to sell this product. Demand for it is destined to be high.”

Brindle asserted that environmental concerns and a desire to reduce business travel would be key drivers in end user adoption.

“There are now no barriers for resellers to overcome; this opens up bigger revenue streams,” he added.

Jess Thompson-Hughes, managing director of wireless specialist React Technologies, claimed he had sold a handful of video products over the years, but had not encountered a great deal of customer demand. He added that most smaller firms were content with voice technology.

“There was a big splurge of video at the end of the 90s, but most people are still happy to pick up the phone,” he added.

Karen Whittaker, marketing consultant for Cisco and Oracle training house Vortex 6, claimed end user training to increase understanding of the technology would boost take-up.

“There are lots of technical reseller courses focusing on delivering and installing the technology,” she said. “But nobody seems to have looked at the end user area. Managers and executives need to understand how to use it.”

Whittaker added that telepresence would be a “huge growth area” for her firm and resellers of all sizes could get involved with the technology.

“You do not have to be a Gold partner to specialise in the technology,” she said.

Guest added that interest in telepresence was beginning to seep down from the enterprise space to the mid-market.

“Telepresence is in the early adopter phase,” she said. “Salespeople and businesses need to understand what the business value is. It is sexy technology, but the challenge for resellers and vendors is translating that ‘wow-factor’ into a proper business case.”