Gartner: ‘Grassroots Demand’ to Fuel Public Sector Use of Videoconferencing

Gartner says 200m workers will use desktop-based videoconferencing by 2015 and large government bodies aren’t going to be left behind.

Market research company Gartner has forecasted the number of workers utilising videoconferencing from their desktops will explode from 7 million in 2008, to over 200 million by 2015.

The prediction is just one in a series of forecasts on the future of telecoms by the company, including one that 40% of businesses will adopt “a blend of Cloud and on-premise based approaches to meet their Unified Communications needs” by 2012. That compares to an estimate of between 3% and 5% last year. Such rises

Scott Marsden, Enterprise telecoms analyst at Gartner, spoke to PublicTechnology and explained the next few years would see a change in attitude towards videoconferencing: “The big change will be that many more organisations will recognise the importance of having video as part of their suite of communications capabilities.”

Marsden pointed out that large government bodies, such as the NHS, will be massive adopters of desktop-bound videoconferencing, whether that’s in the form of Unified Communications solutions, or products originally released for the consumer sector. In fact, the public sector is already a heavy user of the technology: “[Videoconferencing company] Tandberg’s biggest market sector is the public sector.”

“Admittedly a big chunk of that is in the defence space, but Tandberg makes more money in videoconferencing from the public sector than it does from the private sector.

Certain parts of the public sector, like healthcare, are going to be massive adopters - not just for remote surgery or training, but for basic tele-medicine, for remote communities or for individual GPs based far away from their community of interest,” he added.

“These types of use cases will generate a lot of demand in the public sector.”

When it comes to local authorities however, Marsden explained that expected cuts over the next 12 months would hamper the implementation of the technology, and that “things like video may drop down the list of priorities.”

Despite this, a bottom-to-top take up of the technology may begin to proliferate. According to the analyst, “We will see a grassroots demand, specifically as applications become available and are used across community of interest networks.”

The biggest barrier facing widespread adoption of the technology however isn’t cost. Rather, it’s the amount of bandwidth available to run desktop videoconferencing en masse that will continue to stifle a broader uptake.

Marsden went on to describe the future delivery of video as part of a hosted service: “When you move to a model using internet bandwidth, when you move to a model where you’re not holding things inside the network necessarily, it opens up the opportunity for more Cloud-like delivery.

So hosted services, Unified Communications-as-a-Service, is an area we expected to start growing a couple of years ago, and it didn’t take off the way we expected. However in some ways, the whole Cloud discussion has restarted chatter in that area.”

“Video could certainly become part of that [UCaaS]; the critical thing is if you move to a network environment based on next-generation architecture (lots of Ethernet, lack of distance sensitivity), you get to the stage where everything end-to-end paid for as a service.”

Source: conferencingnews.com