Communications and Technology Industry Research

The visual collaboration technology had a lot of fanfare when it was initially introduced. But the unaffordable nature of the technology and other difficulties made the companies turn away from this new technology. But a recent report from Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert), titled World Visual Collaboration Managed Services Markets, states that a perfect storm of technological, economic, and environmental developments has brought visual collaboration to the forefront again.

 

Visual collaboration is the combination of audio and video and data in both real-time and store-and-forward applications. It facilitates people who are separated by distance and time to work together across LAN and WAN connections to create value for their organizations.

 

But before taking the leap to develop products based on this technology, vendors should be aware of their customers' applications and requirements. They should also focus on leveraging relationships with strategic channel partners who are successful in providing visual collaboration equipment, advices the report.

 

“A driver that is most likely to contribute to the growth of the visual collaboration market is the reduction of travel required by a company,” said Iwona Petruczynik Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst. “This can create significant cuts in business costs and help improve productivity levels; employees can conduct their businesses without the need to meet face-to-face with their clients or partners.”

 

In the more mature markets, the visual collaboration managed service providers will likely experience some pricing pressure in the coming years. The prices should fall further in the emerging markets, states the report. Vendors will have to expand their offers and include new or upgraded features to fight this fall, cautions the report.

 

Recently, the company awarded the 2009 Frost & Sullivan Award for Emerging Company of the Year to CommProve (News - Alert) Ltd. in recognition of its strong growth since 1996. CommProve manufactures test solutions for monitoring wireless networks to measure the quality of service. The test solutions from CommProve identify the cause of problems such as radio frequency interference in wireless networks and troubleshoot them.