Artificial intelligence will play a key role in creating growth opportunities and user-friendly interfaces with virtual assistants, finds Frost & Sullivan
The global conferencing services market is expected to grow gradually and reach $11 billion by 2023, due to technology convergence and accelerated usage of conferencing via cloud web and video, mobility and rich analytics. While Latin America is expected to garner a market share of 1.7 percent in the conferencing services space, North America and EMEA will be the key markets with a revenue market share of 60.9 percent and 25.5 percent respectively followed by APAC at 11.9%. Frost & Sullivan expects artificial intelligence (AI) to play a key role in creating user-friendly interfaces with virtual assistants. With market commoditization and little feature differentiation, conference service providers should focus on embedding AI capabilities in conferencing applications to deliver more natural, contextual, and relevant meeting experiences.
Frost & Sullivan’s recent analysis, Growth Opportunities in the Global Conferencing Services Market, Forecast to 2023, reveals innovations, industry challenges, disruptive trends, companies to action, market leaders, and revenues by service segment and vendor. It also explains how market participants should action to capitalize on the opportunities available in the conferencing services market. This research service captures the market opportunity for audio, cloud web and video conferencing, and managed video conferencing sub-segments.
“The market momentum and growth will be driven by the widespread user demand for cloud web and video conferencing services accelerating industry transformation,” said Vaishno Srinivasan, Industry Analyst, Conferencing & Collaboration, Frost & Sullivan. “In addition, user demand is expected to shift from pure-play audio to simple and intuitive audio and video conferencing, content sharing, and persistent collaboration experiences across multiple devices.”
To gain a competitive advantage, Srinivasan recommends providers look toward building next-generation collaboration services over open extensive platforms that allow easy integration with best-of-breed, third-party applications.
To raise growth opportunities, conferencing service providers (CSPs) should focus on the following:
- Providing intuitive, simple touch user interfaces that enable instant content sharing and consistent collaboration across all modalities. This would be the key to drive conferencing usage in huddle rooms and flexible meeting spaces;
- Expanding solution portfolio and technology partnerships to meet the growing demand for team collaboration; and
- Pursuing opportunities both up-market (vertical and horizontal specialized solutions) as well as down-market (unbundled solutions) to combat attrition to free services and UC solutions.
Companies such as Arkadin, Cisco, Microsoft, BT Conferencing, Orange Business Services, and West have innovatively diversified through a series of proprietary solutions and partnerships to offer services across multiple sectors.
“Increasing competition from hosted/cloud unified communications providers with ‘all-in-one’ licenses that combine private branch exchange (PBX) functionalities, session initiation protocol (SIP) trunking, contact center services, and conferencing are restricting the growth of traditional conferencing service providers with relatively limited unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) capability,” noted Srinivasan.
Growth Opportunities in the Global Conferencing Services Market, Forecast to 2023 is part of Frost & Sullivan’s global Conferencing & Collaboration Growth Partnership Service program.