According to several reports, the communications market in India should see steady growth over the next four years. Conference call services, especially web conferencing, are being accessed from the cloud more frequently, while there seems to be no limit to the number of free/freemium service providers on the low end of the market.
Communications revenue is expected to nearly double in India from just over $800 million in 2013 to $1.5 billion in 2018, a CAGR of 12.4 percent, according to 6W Research. Organizations enjoy the cost savings of conferencing that come from not having to travel to a site to conduct or participate in a meeting.
Any web conferencing solution in the region must support BYOD policies. Users demand that such solutions allow them to access meetings from their mobile devices as well as laptop and desktop machines.
A Frost and Sullivan report found that an abundance of vendors offered free or ‘freemium’ services targeted towards small and medium sized businesses (SMB). Typically these services impose some kind of limitation that fee services are not subject to. Some limit the number of users you can have on any given conference. Others limit the number of conferences you can have in a month. Another common policy is to offer the service free for a limited time before it converts to a fee service.
The same report also found that demand for conference call services from the cloud will grow faster than demand for the on-premise equivalent. This should come as no surprise; cloud services in general are more appealing to many companies because it saves them money and helps them avoid the hassles that come with maintaining the upgrades and equipment themselves. With more people using smartphones and tablets, processing power and intelligence has shifted to cloud machines that are not as constrained by storage, processing and battery life limitations.
When it comes to the market for conference call services, India seems to be consistent with the global market. Growth over the next few years will be steady but not explosive. Businesses and organizations will continue a long-term shift away from on-premises solutions and towards cloud solutions that better accommodate the mobile market.
Edited by Maurice Nagle