✊🏼 🐅 🐶 Video conferencing is now a market and new technologies. Longrid, part one 📹 ⬅️ 👨🏼‍✈️

Thanks to video conferencing, some manage to maintain productivity even in self-isolation, when personal communication is limited. Therefore, it is now especially interesting to see what developments have appeared in the videoconferencing segment over the past year and in which direction the market is moving. A lot of everything, so it was divided into two parts.

Part 1:
- The videoconferencing market - a global cross
- section - Hardware vs video communications software
- Huddle rooms - aquariums
- Who will: mergers and acquisitions
- Not a single video
- Competition or integration?
- Compression and data transfer

Part 2 :
- Smart conferences
- Unusual cases. Robot control and policing

Over the past few years, video conferencing has become an everyday and truly massive tool for business communication. The appearance of affordable, high-quality and technically advanced software services helped - both working on-premises on local platforms, and available on the SaaS model from a public cloud.

A particularly noticeable leap has occurred in the last five years. Thanks to the development of broadband access and the advent of high-quality software, videoconferencing has significantly fallen in price. At the same time, equipment also fell in price. Mainly due to the fact that open software platforms are not tied to a specific manufacturer and allow you to connect a wide range of peripheral devices. As a result, the availability of high-quality video communications has increased - even small companies can afford such a service.

But constantly reducing the price to manufacturers and service providers, of course, is unprofitable. Therefore, they follow the standard path of package services, offering "more features for the same money." This stimulates the introduction of new developments in the field of videoconferencing. She receives more and more intellectual functions, which are increasingly based on machine learning algorithms. Moreover, technologies using elements of virtual and augmented reality are already approaching.

VKS Market - World Slice

Assessing the specific volumes of the global videoconferencing market is not an easy task, because even global research companies cite indicators that can differ significantly. If we talk about the year 2018, then, say, Research Nester estimates the market size at about $ 5 billion, Transparency Market Research at $ 5.8 billion, Global Market Insights says more than $ 12 billion. Frost & Sullivan, it seems, did not decide at all trifles and gave an estimate of $ 50.8 billion. With confidence we can only say that the indicator is measured in billions of US dollars, but this is obvious without deep analytics.

Volume of the global videoconferencing market in 2012–2021, according to Frost & Sullivan estimates and forecasts

However, most of the reports available have similar points. For example, all analysts agree that the market will grow at least until 2025, at an average rate of about 10% per year. Also, experts agree on the issue of who is on the list of world leaders. The composition differs little, although from time to time they change places. In the segment of hardware solutions, Cisco, Poly / Polycom, Lifesize, Huawei, StarLeaf, Avaya, Logitech, ClearOne, Crestron, ZTE are leading. At the same time, the first five companies account for the majority of global sales.

The research company Recon Research has received sales data for all key players in the global videoconferencing market over the past two years. In their report, they note that in terms of money more than 95% of the world segment of specialized hardware solutions is occupied by the development of Cisco, Poly, Lifesize, Huawei and StarLeaf. These same companies together hold 90% of the market in terms of the number of devices delivered.

Hardware vs video communications software

Another interesting conclusion made by the compilers of the Recon Research report was that the implementation of hardware systems, contrary to popular opinion, at least does not fall, despite the rapid growth of software solutions, including cloud ones. In any case, the five industry leaders mentioned did not sell less equipment, either in monetary or quantitative terms.

Since 2017, there has been no decline, and it is not expected for the results of 2019–2020. This mainly means that each product group has its own sphere of application and users are not ready to completely abandon special hardware solutions for meeting rooms. Moreover, these areas harmoniously complement each other, instead of competing. There is no “software versus iron” confrontation on the market, as predicted several years ago. There is an obvious symbiosis, first of all, it is felt in the field of corporate solutions.

A home user can get by with a laptop camera or smartphone resources. However, corporate-level video conferencing has higher demands on image quality, stability of communication channels, and security, not to mention functionality.

Headphones and a laptop, enough photo Zoom are enough for home.

Special software platforms or VCaaS (Videoconferencing as a Service) class cloud services are convenient as the core of the system. They take on the functions of a video server, and also provide tools for collaboration that are constantly updated and improved.

Software solutions allowed to remove the main limitation that stood in the way of widespread corporate video conferencing - the high price of a classic video server (MCU). As for the periphery, everything is standard here and something fundamentally new rarely appears. Now for most meeting rooms, the basic set of equipment consists of a camera, an array of microphones, a group of speakers, as well as a central codec module. Usually this is a mini-PC x86 architecture, which is needed to combine all this and connect to a corporate software server or cloud VCaaS. As a means of display is used, as a rule, a simple TV. Also, as prices decline, interactive whiteboards become more and more popular.

Digital Jamboard, photo B + K

There are special solutions that combine all the mentioned elements, except the monitor, in one case. These are the so-called video bars. They allow you to connect the videoconferencing system to the cloud "in one click."

Poly Studio video bar, Poly photo

The cost of an integrated solution for a small meeting room now starts at $ 2–2.5 thousand, for this money you can buy a high-quality and functional corporate system of one of the market leaders. Also, if desired, the company can always assemble its meeting room on the basis of standard equipment, purchasing components separately. But it is unlikely that in this case the solution will turn out to be much cheaper.

There are also monoblock systems that do not require additional worries. This may cost about $ 10 thousand. They are presentable, convenient and designed primarily for the desktop manager.

All-in-One Cisco Webex Desk Pro, Cisco Photo

Huddle rooms - aquariums

Another characteristic market trend of the past few years is the growing popularity of small meeting rooms up to 5 people. According to the already mentioned agency Recon Research, today there are at least 25 million worldwide. Research and Markets say about 33 million, but emphasizes that only 3% of this number are equipped with video conferencing systems.

Webex Room Kit Mini for small meeting rooms, Cisco photo

In addition, in the spring of 2019, Recon Research and Mersive published a survey of experts in the field of audiovisual systems, which manage a total of 55 thousand meeting rooms equipped with VKS systems. According to the results, it turned out that the available negotiators are distributed by size as follows: 53% small, 36% medium and 11% large.

Shares of meeting rooms of different sizes in enterprises according to the results of an expert survey for 2018, Recon Research & Mersive 2019

At the same time, experts suggest that in the next 2-3 years the number of small rooms will grow by almost 20%, medium ones by 0.8%, and large negotiations will be reduced by 7.8%. Many offices are moving to the concept of open spaces - open space.

The expected change in the number of meeting rooms of different sizes at enterprises in 2019-2021 according to a survey of experts, Recon Research & Mersive 2019

Increasingly, modern business needs operational meetings for small working groups whose participants can be, for example, in different countries. In such cases, it is much more profitable for companies to use 100% several small meeting rooms instead of one large half-empty conference room.

Demand is also growing for BYOD-solutions (Bring Your Own Device) for video conferencing, when users connect to a meeting from their own devices. Wi-Fi content sharing systems are becoming popular. In order to show a presentation to colleagues, it is enough to bring your laptop or smartphone to the meeting room, no need to worry about finding suitable wires.

Who whom: mergers and acquisitions

The global videoconferencing market is still far from consolidation - purchases here occur frequently. For example, in May 2019, the popular Vidyo video conferencing platform was purchased for $ 40 million. She participated in the standardization of video coding and gave the world a protocol based on the SVC architecture, which formed the basis of all modern software videoconferencing solutions. The buyer was Enghouse Systems, whose main area of activity is software development.

If we talk about larger transactions, the main one took place in June 2019, when Plantronics acquired Polycom, one of the world leaders in the market for hardware videoconferencing. The purchase amount amounted to $ 2 billion. As a result, in the spring of 2019, the joint brand Poly appeared. But already in November it became known that the new company, in turn, could become an object of purchase. According to media reports, the Swiss manufacturer Logitech was ready to pay $ 2.2 billion for Poly. As a result, the deal did not take place. According to unconfirmed reports, the counter amount of $ 3 billion did not suit the potential buyer.

Hard times are going through Avaya. All last year, the market was waiting intensely for whom the company would be sold. In October 2019, it became known that they had signed a strategic contract for the development of a joint product with the operator of cloud communication services and collaboration RingCentral. Under the agreement, RingCentral invests $ 500 million in the company, for which it receives a 6% stake in Avaya and certain technologies. But as industry experts point out, the most important aspect of this transaction is access to the customer base. It is for her that RingCentral pays a lot of money. The resulting half a billion will not solve all the financial problems of Avaya, but only allow to patch some holes and get a short break.

Partnership efforts resulted in the emergence of a UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) commercial service called Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral. The official announcement took place in February 2020.

Just last week, the American operator Verizon announced the purchase of an actively developing vendor, BlueJeans, which provides MCU services from the cloud. The exact amount was not disclosed, but confirmed that it is less than $ 500 million. The deal will be closed in the second half of 2020. BlueJeans technologies are new owners who intend to integrate into their own unified communications system.

Not a single video

Software and cloud platforms today have taken on the role of a key element of the videoconferencing ecosystem. Therefore, it is also worth talking a little about them, although, of course, this topic deserves a separate article.

It is extremely difficult to identify a unique leader due to the lack of comparable indicators in the public domain - financial data and the subscriber base for all market participants. Nevertheless, the first fifteen global operators can be distinguished if you do not try to put them on a pedestal. Analysis of the media space, including accessible analytical reports, suggests that such services (in alphabetical order) are in demand in the corporate environment at the end of 2019: Adobe Connect, BlueJeans (now Verizon), Cisco Webex, ClickMeeting, CyberLink U Meeting , Google Hangouts, Intermedia Unite, Join.me, Lifesize, LogMeIn GoToMeeting, Microsoft Teams (+ Skype for Business), RingCentral, Slack, TrueConf, Zoho Meeting, Zoom.

Now the topic of corporate videoconferencing is already inseparable from the segment of systems for collaboration. If earlier these were in many different markets, today all collaboration platforms have the ability to video. Nevertheless, some analytical companies somehow manage to isolate the collaboration segment from the general market of corporate communication and communication tools. For example, Research and Markets forecasts that the global collaboration software market will reach $ 16.6 billion in 2025. A corresponding Gartner report suggests that the same segment will reach $ 4.9 billion in 2021.

Here, by the way, it is worth recalling a remarkable fact - in the Gartner Meeting Solutions 2019 thematic report, the Russian brand first appeared. It's about TrueConf, which is not only a leaderdomestic market of professional on-premises solutions for the videoconferencing, but now it is also included in the world major league. In the Meeting Solutions quadrant, they appeared in the niche zone among integrated platforms combining voice, video, content sharing, and other tools. These are such world giants as Huawei, Avaya, ZTE and others. The international recognition of any company at such a level is an event worthy of attention. In detail we rated this rating as a separate post on Habré .

Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions, Gartner 2019

We also managed to find interesting data from Spiceworks. They conducted a comparative study.in order to find out which of the most popular global cloud services for collaboration is most in demand in the corporate environment, almost a thousand IT managers working in various companies were interviewed.

Percentage of IT managers interviewed whose businesses use popular instant messengers Spiceworks 2019

The results showed that Microsoft is quite effectively promoting Teams and transferring Skype for Business clients to it, which, as you know, will soon stop working . As of the end of March 2020, against the backdrop of a pandemic, the number of daily Teams users has grown to 44 million people. Microsoft and Slack compete in announcing different poorly matched numbers. In October 2019, Slack announced the figure of 12 million daily users, in March it was transformedin 12.5 million at the same time working. Strictly speaking, Slack does not offer its own video communication services, but provides the opportunity to use partner services from the application, including the means of Microsoft itself, which further erodes the boundaries of markets and brands.

Competition or integration?

As can be seen from the previous sections, the global market for video conferencing systems is represented by a very wide list of manufacturers and developers - there are several dozen of the most popular platforms. Each of them has its own audience. Therefore, the issue of compatibility is of particular importance.

It often happens that a user has several software clients installed at once. In the business segment, very often there is a need for joint interaction between VKS services from various developers. Formally, this should not raise questions, since many platforms are built on the basis of nominally compatible technologies. But in practice, such integration often turns into a tangible problem.

The latest specialized events that were held before the epidemic - ISE, Enterprise Connect - demonstrate the desire of leading software developers for compatibility. But this is expressed in the creation of ecosystems from equipment that they certify to work with their solutions. That is, "our software is compatible with any equipment." Equipment manufacturers, in turn, sell kits that are compatible “out of the box” with a particular software. There are attempts to call from one service to another, but, as a rule, through the SIP protocol, which requires a separate or more expensive license. Until now, the problem has been solved by external add-ons.

Pexip has gained popularity in this area. They offer a gateway for Google Hangouts Meet and Microsoft products, behind the scenes remains Cisco. Less well-known solutions for startups like ZiipRoom and Mio. The first commercial releases of ZiipRoom appeared in mid-2018, then their Bose audio producer bought a cloud-based platform for combining various VKS solutions. So far, Mio only synchronizes communication between Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Cisco Webex chats through the API.

In early 2020, Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex and Zoom themselves promised to make their room solutions compatible. From intercoms with certified equipment that incorporates web technology, it will be possibledirectly join as a guest to meetings of another vendor through a WebRTC application. Most likely, it will become part of these proprietary software clients and will provide access for third-party guests through a browser. In fact, it is quasi-compatible with link entry. Later, Microsoft promises to add other partners to this scheme.

Connecting to Teams, Webex and Zoom from one interface, Microsoft screenshot

Russian TrueConf at the end of 2019 announced the possibility of participation from its applications in conferences and webinars of any foreign services with SIP support. In particular, they tested video calling and content sharing with BlueJeans, Cisco Webex, GoToMeeting and Lifesize Cloud.

Data compression and transmission

Fundamental changes in the methods of encoding and transmitting data occur infrequently. In the summer of 2019, Cisco showed off the new AV1 video codec at the Big Apple Video conference.

The technology is positioned as the best replacement for the H.265 and H.264 codecs, which are used in most modern videoconferencing. AV1 should implement as a standard all the accumulated innovations in the field of signal processing and data compression using machine learning. It was created jointly by the companies of the Alliance for Open Media, which was formed in 2015. In addition to Cisco, technology leaders such as Amazon, Google, Intel, Netflix and others contributed to the development. The protocol is free of royalties, which may well make it the new industry standard.

However, this codec requires unreasonably large computing resources to operate. The Cisco demonstration showed that the transmission of HD and FullHD video required half the bandwidth of the communication channel compared to H.264 with equivalent image and sound quality. The experiment was recognized as successful, but about UltraHD, for the transfer of which AV1 was created, there is no talk yet.

The other day, Google announced the transfer to AV1 of its custom Duo video chat, but this will only work on selected devices with hardware encoding.

Thanks to everyone who read it. Part 2 has already been published :
- Smart conferences
- Unusual cases. Robot control and policing

We thank Igor Kirillov for the preparation of the material and the editors of B + K for its updating.

Video conferencing is now a market and new technologies. Longrid, part one