'Collaboration at the Desktop' Drives Change in The World Web Conferencing Market.

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Frost & Sullivan, a global leader in strategic growth consulting, announces the release of its latest webconferencing market analysis, World Web Conferencing Markets, "A High Growth Industry Setting New Expectations for the Future of Group Collaboration" by David Alexander, Industry Manager for Frost & Sullivan's Collaborative Communications Group.

The world web conferencing market continues to show signs of change, as the concept of "collaboration at the desktop" increasingly becomes a reality.

The last two years have delivered an extensive amount of hype surrounding the "true convergence" of audio, data, and video conferencing. However, in reality, the market is just beginning to see the first signs of rich media conferencing being delivered to end users' desktops.

While converged conferencing solutions add significant value to end users and vendors, the evolution of the overall collaboration marketplace points to an industry miles ahead of an integrated conferencing solution, and into a collaborative suite of applications including, VoIP, desktop videoconferencing, instant messaging, presence, portals, and document management.

"By and large, these converging pieces of the collaboration puzzle, exist today as separate communication practices or business processes, sometimes referred to as 'silos'," However, in time, each will slowly start to come together as audio, web, and video conferencing become a converged conferencing solution, and business applications become a single collaboration tool," says Industry Manager David Alexander.

In many instances, the convergence of these technologies has led to increased development efforts from vendors as well as, an increase in partnerships, mergers and acquisitions.

However, while collaboration solutions continue to expand, in terms of feature sets, an up-and-coming sector of the industry exists in "light" web conferencing solutions from new and existing vendors. Alexander expects that while this segment of the market may in fact offer short-term growth opportunities for vendors, converged solutions offer greater long-term potential for success.

"Today, the majority of end users continue to use web conferencing as a "PowerPoint-push" or desktop sharing technology, in a presentation environment." While this is a critical component of web conferencing offerings, end user behaviors are changing," says Alexander.

There are several growth opportunities within the conferencing and collaboration business environment. Frost & Sullivan expects that this analysis will provide vendors with valuable insight to increase their footprint and penetration opportunities within the emerging "collaborative solutions" marketplace.

If you are interested in a virtual brochure, which provides an overview of the latest analysis of the World Web Conferencing Markets, please e-mail Dustin McVey at [e-mail] with the following information:

--World Web Conferencing Markets #6918

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