If you’re a service provider offering audio conferencing to your business customers, you’re probably seeing an increase in demand for your service. After all, the conferencing market is growing exponentially right now, due to the current global recession and the fact that companies everywhere are slashing their travel budgets and opting for audio conferencing services to facilitate much-needed live collaboration.

Recent industry research shows that the audio conferencing market is growing at a 28 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) and will soon surpass 50 billion minutes of use annually. At the same time, more and more new conferencing service providers (CSPs) are entering the market to meet this increasing demand. Some are new entrants, while others are existing players who have added conferencing services to their portfolios. As a result of this increasing competition, pricing for conferencing services is flattening and competition is getting fierce.

That means service providers must be able to deliver their conferencing services as efficiently and affordably as possible, while at the same time ensuring service quality. Margins are going to be tighter in this market moving forward, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t “untapped opportunities” which providers can still take advantage of.

If you’re a CSP (News - Alert) running your service over TDM-based conference bridges, you’re probably well aware of the limitations you face in terms of being able to quickly and easily roll out new features and capabilities. Sure those old circuit-switched bridges are workhorses, and quite reliable ones at that, but it’s time-consuming and expensive to do new things with them. You’re probably looking at your IP-based competitors with awe as they quickly and effortlessly roll out new features to wow their customers – not to mention the fact that their Web-based, on-demand systems make their services so much simpler and easier for their customers to consume.

If you want to survive in this new, fiercely-competitive conferencing market, ultimately you will have no choice but to migrate to an IP-based architecture: It’s not a question of if, but when. As more and more IP-based CSPs enter the marketplace, it will become increasingly challenging for you to differentiate your service. At the same time, this is a huge market opportunity, one that you probably don’t want to miss out on.

It’s time to start planning your migration to VoIP! And what better place to begin than by yanking out those antiquated TDM bridges and replacing them with advanced IP media servers. Today’s advanced IP media servers, which perform real-time processing of media streams in an IP-based architecture, reduce the cost per conferencing port, while reducing physical space down to one-tenth of TDM-based solutions. Best of all these new systems employ open standards – including SIP (Session Initiation Protocol (News - Alert), RTP (Real-Time Transport Protocol), and MSML (Media Server Markup Language) – which means they are interoperable with other vendors’ equipment. As such, it has become much simpler and less expensive for service providers to integrate new solutions in with their existing systems and architecture.

The problem with TDM-based systems is that they tend to be closed, proprietary solutions with few scalability options. An IP-based architecture, on the other hand, is extremely flexible and scalable. Today’s IP-based systems typically separate functions like application/signal processing from media processing, resulting in open architectures built upon scalable “best-of-breed” components that are interconnected using open standards-based interfaces.

In a next-generation architecture, the application server is where the conferencing and web applications run, including call control logic and end-to-end signaling, along with integrated interfaces into order entry and back-end billing systems. The application server also controls the IP media server to perform the media processing.

More specifically, the IP media server terminates the inbound RTP media streams, completes the audio conference mix and sends the mixed audio as RTP streams back to the participants—all done in real-time thousands of times a second. This separation of call control and media processing makes it easier to scale the components independently, while allowing multiple applications to share the same IP media server. This architecture also benefits service introduction, as new service capabilities are often isolated to changes or additions to the application server.

Another huge advantage of the next generation architecture is fault tolerance. With advanced IP media servers positioned strategically across your network you can provide a level of reliability/redundancy that would otherwise be too expensive/difficult to achieve with a TDM-based system. Bear in mind that as audio conferencing demand continues to grow, it’s likely that subscribers will insist on carrier-grade availability and service level agreements. Therefore, leading media server vendors must offer sophisticated redundancy and failover capabilities, so that instead of losing a call, there are only a couple seconds of silence in the event of an IP media server component failure.

And here’s something else to think about: Demand for video conferencing is growing at an even faster pace than audio conferencing – and this is yet another market opportunity for service providers moving forward. With the flexibility and expandability of today’s advanced IP media servers, you have the option of layering a telepresence or video conferencing service on your existing service for a fraction of the cost of ripping out your old equipment and starting anew. In fact, many of today’s IP media server products are specifically designed to support a broad range of services including video, unified communications, messaging, speech-enabled services or ring back tones. That means you look to expand your service portfolio by offering new, differentiated capabilities that will grow new revenue streams.

Want to learn more about the “untapped opportunities” the conferencing market holds for service providers? Then be sure to check out the upcoming May 6 Webinar, “Untapped Opportunities in Audio Conferencing,” sponsored by RadiSys (News - Alert) and TMCnet.

In this informative Webinar, executives, VoIP application developers, system integrators, product managers and network architects will learn:

--Industry growth trends in audio conferencing services

--Economic and service benefits of VoIP audio conferencing architectures

--Opportunities in offering new, differentiated collaboration services into untapped markets

Ray Adensamer (News - Alert), senior product marketing manager, RadiSys, will discuss what service providers are deploying to realize this new market opportunity, why it’s different than what has been deployed in the past, and what new services can create a differentiated offering at dramatically lower costs. Marc Beattie, managing partner and principal analyst, Wainhouse Research, will provide background on the current $4 billion global market, why it’s growing, what is changing, and what to expect next.

To register, click here.