While the telepresence market is seeing a decline—potentially just a temporary one—Cisco and Polycom are still dominating the landscape, according to IDC. But the research firm also noted that Huawei, Teliris, Avaya’s Radvision and Vidyo have all emerged as fellow market-movers.
“The worldwide immersive telepresence equipment market has been experiencing more downs than ups lately — from several years of robust revenue growth prior to 2011, to revenue declines in 2011 and in the first three quarters of 2012 for some of the vendors,” said Rich Costello, senior analyst of enterprise communications infrastructure at IDC. “As a result, IDC foresees a scenario where mostly mid-to-large size companies maintain, but deploy to a lesser degree, new immersive telepresence solutions in central locations for specific high-end use cases, while also supplementing collaboration strategies with lower-cost, and/or no-cost, video alternatives that can support desktop, distributed, and mobile workers.”
Organizations considering deploying immersive telepresence solutions need to take more of a strategic look at how implementing this technology will impact the current networking infrastructure, as well as integrate into their environment and business-critical applications now and in the future—a perfect role for channel partners.
“IDC MarketScape leaders and major players are well positioned to seamlessly meet the needs of enterprise users in both the near and long-term, while contenders can address some specific telepresence usage requirements,” Costello added.
Earlier in the year, Infonetics Research noted that generated by the enterprise videoconferencing and telepresence market dropped to $644 million in the second quarter of 2012, a 6 percent decline.
“We view the current revenue slowdown as temporary rather than a fundamental decline in demand, as overall shipments of hardware endpoints are still up by double digits year-over-year, signaling on-going strong demand for videoconferencing capabilities,” said Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst for enterprise networks and video at Infonetics Research.
PBX-based systems were the only segment to grow in the second quarter of 2012, continuing on a double-digit growth trajectory driven by videophones, the firm found. Unit shipments of telepresence and desktop systems are down by more than 45 percent year-over-year.
And while demand for enterprise videoconferencing and telepresence equipment remains strong, the growth rate is slowing. Market leader Cisco’s Q2 telepresence and video conferencing revenue declined 17 percent sequentially, and market share fell 5 points.