SMB’s turning to Conferencing Solutions in tough economic times

In today’s tough economic times, driven by higher travel costs, staff reduction, and tight credit – SMB are turning to solutions that will reduce costs and provide clearly identifiable short-term ROI. In the past year, conferencing solutions service providers that provide hosted audio and integrated web/video conferencing services are experiencing dramatic increases in adoption of these services among SMBs and mid-market enterprises. Not only are more SMBs adopting these solutions, the existing users of these solutions are also using these solutions more often.

• Audio Conferencing (leading vendors – Intercall, ATT, Verizon ,IP-PBX and hosted VoIP vendors):
  
  • Distributed workforce conference calls
    
  • Improve employee collaboration and productivity
    
  • Support for mobility, don’t need to be in front of screen for conference
    
  • No need to be at desktop, works well when on the road
    
  • Integration of VoIP solutions reduces costs by reducing call toll charges
    
  • Increased adoption of podcasts
    
• Web Conferencing (leading vendors – Cisco/WebEx, Microsoft LiveMeeting, Citrix OnLine Go-To-Meeting, IBM Sametime Unyte and Lotus SameTime):
  
  • Easy-to-use
    
  • Save travel costs and participant time
    
  • Support revenue generation activities
    
  • Availability of hosted service with pay-as-you-go
    
  • Ability to host impromptu meetings
    
  • Improve employee collaboration & productivity
    
  • Better support a global distributed workforce
    
  • Improve organizations efficiency
    
  • Better communication and collaboration between employees, customers, partners, suppliers
    
  • Fewer number of experts become more productive by scaling knowledge
    
• Video Conferencing (leading vendors – Polycom, Tandberg,Lifesize,Cisco/Webex,IBM):
  
  • Save travel costs and meeting expenses
    
  • Need to interconnect distributed branch
    
  • Better and more interactive communication and collaboration between employees
    
  • Ability to utilize off-the-shelf video cameras and headsets
    
  • Availability of affordable web and on-premise based solutions
    
  • Increased bandwidth availability
    
  • Increased adoption of rich media communications – video
    
  • Better interaction with outsourcing partners
    
  • Fewer number of experts become more productive by scaling knowledge
    

This bodes well for the vendors, VAR’s and service providers involved with selling these conferencing solutions. However, businesses need to be careful when selecting a vendor. Stability and financial viability of vendors/service providers becomes more important in the current economic climate, as startups feel the squeeze.

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