Cisco, Polycom and Avaya make hardware to let enterprises to video conference, but the arrival of cloud computing means they’re likely to see flat growth.
That’s the conclusion of Eric Abbruzzese, research analyst at ABI Research, whose video conference hardware doesn’t quite cut the ice.
He said: “With the current market focus on cloud computing and hardware virtualisation, dedicated hardware sales will see little growth in all video delivery markets, including videoconferencing telepresence hardware.”
He said hardware revenues are likely to be more or less flat up to 2020 but the Ciscos of this world will have little luck selling kit if products don’t adopt to a virtualisation model.
He said the three firms in question have already begun to move to cloud based systems and using their existing products as a foundation for the cloud services.
Aside from the enterprise, video conferencing for us plebs will show strong growth. Skype, ooVoo and Google Hangouts will all have their place in the sun.
