Despite the bad economy, or perhaps partly because of it, demand is strong for conferencing solutions, including audio, web and video. But to take full advantage of the market, solution providers must understand each type of conferencing and how to integrate them into a total solution. In fact, some say that all conferencing functions are being subsumed by unified communications based on an IP network.

"The majority of our unified communications deals today include audio, video and instant messaging as part of the package," says Darryl Wilson, Canadian practice director for Dimension Data, a major Cisco Systems unified communications reseller. "Today everything is truly unified, whereas one or two years ago it was still about voice over IP or dial-tone replacement."

The market for audio, web and videoconferencing combined totaled more than $6 billion in 2007, according to Krithi Rao, industry analyst for conferencing and collaboration at Frost & Sullivan. She predicts average growth rates over the next five years of 5 percent for audio, 25 percent for web and 21 percent for video. This strong growth is being driven by a number of factors:

• Already tight travel budgets are being further slashed as a result of the economic slump.
• Companies large and small are competing globally and their workforces are becoming more distributed and less centralized.
• Conferencing and telecommunications technologies have matured enough to reliably support sophisticated collaboration in real time.

Bringing Staff Together
A recent survey by Nemertes Research found that almost 90 percent of enterprises had employees who work remotely from supervisors or workgroups. The need to stay in close touch with these employees and to maximize their productivity is leading companies to invest in collaboration technologies. And it's not just large companies. In a sampling of companies of all sizes, Nemertes found that 55 percent use web conferencing, 48 percent use IP audioconferencing and 51 percent use videoconferencing.

As they become embedded into unified communications platforms, conferencing features will become more cost-effective for small to midsize businesses. Traditionally, SMBs might have used low-cost third-party audio and web conferencing. But now major manufacturers, including Cisco and Microsoft, are bundling such capabilities into their unified communications platforms.

Solution provider NWN is just starting to show teleconferencing -- involving audio, web and video -- to its midmarket clients. NWN President and CEO Mont Phelps thinks integrated conferencing is finally crossing into the mainstream. In fact, NWN started using the technology internally over the last six months. Rather than fly in its farflung marketing team for its annual planning meeting, the company staged an "internet huddle" using voice, video and web conferencing. "By doing an internet huddle rather than flying everyone in," says Phelps, "we've probably saved enough to justify the installation of the system."

In addition, NWN's system is helping to sell its clients on conferencing. "We try to bring customers into our facilities as often as we can," says Phelps. "It's like the difference between telling someone about the Grand Canyon and taking them to the edge of it and letting them look out for themselves.".

Convergence Adds Power
To capitalize on this opportunity, solution providers need a broad skill set. Traditionally, specialists have handled certain types of conferencing. Videoconferencing, in particular, tended to be a stand-alone specialty. In the future, solution providers will need to meld all these technologies together, whether by integrating multimanufacturer solutions or by specializing in the unified communications platform from a particular manufacturer.

That may sound like a tall order, but "that's where the big business value occurs. And when the big business value occurs, big partner margins occur," says Richard McLeod, senior director, goto- market group, worldwide channels at Cisco. "It's the convergence of those various technologies that really adds power to the solution."

At the same time, manufacturers have recognized that customers want to mix and match conferencing technologies, and they are working to make their products operate together, says Mike Mason, senior Cisco engineer at Ingram Micro's Solution Center in Buffalo, N.Y. Right now, the focus is on ensuring that manufacturers' collaboration client software can work with other software and hardware. As an example, IBM Lotus Sametime, a platform for unified communications and collaboration, enables conferencing and other functions to be accessed and launched within Microsoft Office, Microsoft Outlook and Cisco Unified Communications Manager. Mason expects to see substantial progress on integration over the next six months.

The Integration Opportunity
For solution providers, this evolution creates prime opportunities to serve as trusted advisors and offer high-value services. They can help clients figure out how best to use conferencing in their particular situation. They can enable the relevant network features if the customer already has them bundled in, or add them if they're needed. They can supply additional hardware as required, such as IP phones or videocameras. They can integrate conferencing technologies with the customer's business applications, such as a customer relationship management system. And they can train client staff on how to use and get the most out of the new technologies.

To get ahead of the competition, the key is to understand the client's business -- why it needs conferencing and how it can best use it, says Frost & Sullivan's Rao. "It's not like voice messaging or IP telephony, which are general-purpose solutions used across the company," she notes. By understanding the business's needs, solution providers can customize web conferencing by integrating it with the company's CRM system, for example, to easily initiate conferences from there. "If you understand why these people need to collaborate," says Rao, "then you can sell more than just plain old web conferencing or plain old video."

What's more, the integration of conferencing capabilities can create upsell opportunities, says Tom Mann, a Microsoft engineer and instructor at Ingram Micro's Solution Center in Buffalo. If a customer is buying Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007, which serves as the basis for Microsoft's collaboration and conferencing capabilities, it's likely to upgrade to Office 2007, he notes. Plus, Microsoft recommends running OCS with Exchange Server 2007 -- and "a lot of people out there are still running Exchange Server 2003," says Mann.

Perhaps the highest value a solution provider can add is demonstrating how to leverage conferencing technologies, says Jack Blaeser, president and general manager of the Americas for BT Conferencing, a unit of BT. BT Conferencing not only sells solutions, but it shows companies how to use the various capabilities, including educating and training the client's employees.

"That's important because employees are sometimes uncomfortable with these technologies," says Blaeser. The better you train employees on how to use the right technology for the right purpose, the more you can help change the company's business processes to become more efficient, which is the ultimate ROI for conferencing.

If you'd like to see the technology in action, Ingram Micro's Solution Centers in Buffalo and Santa Ana, Calif., have conferencing solutions deployed from Cisco and Microsoft for in-person and remote demonstrations. For more information, Ingram Micro's customers can contact their sales representative.