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Over the years, the Indian conferencing market has come a long way. From the early days of low-cost, vanilla audio conferencing the market has moved ahead and diversified into newer offerings such as video, and now real presence teleconferencing, catering to diverse segments of the enterprise. The country's video-conferencing endpoints market has seen phenomenal growth year-on-year, mainly because of a government-led program to develop an Internet protocol infrastructure. This has resulted in increased availability of broadband, and a significant reduction in communication costs.

The conferencing market is moving toward higher quality products such as high definition conferencing and telepresence. It is relatively new phenomenon of video communication that enables users to be able to communicate and collaborate in a virtual environment, giving an almost real experience.

The growth of the overall Asia Pacific videoconferencing endpoints markets is expected to be led by the corporate sector, where converged voice, data, and video solutions are likely to have their strongest appeal, primarily as productivity tools for knowledge workers. According to VOICE&DATA estimates, the total market for audio-video conferencing products and solutions during 2006-07 was Rs 100 crore. In terms of units, 4,000 videoconferencing units were sold.

The Players
Polycom continued to enjoy the leadership position with about 50% market share, and total revenue of Rs 50 crore. In the audio conferencing market, Polycom has 91% market share. Over the years, Polycom has forged major distribution alliances with Bharti Teletech in FY 2006-07, with an aggressive focus on the Indian market. Government verticals contributed hugely to Polycom's revenue. Polycom has also aligned its channel and distribution strategy to reach out to the SMB and SOHO segments.

It made efforts to increase its presence from sixteen cities to thirty-two cities targeting the SOHO segment. It also strengthened its distribution partnership, and devised a retail strategy to increase its presence in the country.

In FY 2006-07, European vendor Tandberg stood at second place with 24% market share, and revenue of Rs 24 crore. Italian conferencing giant Aethra Telecomunicazioni made substantial inroads into the market, clocking a revenue of 14 crore. It was able to garner 14% market share. It has distribution alliance with Siemens wants to expand its clientele across the spectrum from the entry level to advanced level at affordable prices. Aethra has significant share in the banking segment, and for the next year it is expecting significant results in the government verticals such as NIC, NHAI, defense etc. It aims for 40% of the Indian market share, and plans to introduce new product range in India. Revenue of other players such as Sony, and Vcon could not cross the single digit mark. Avaya, which markets Polycom, and Sony earned Rs 39 crore in revenue in this fiscal.

Latest Arrivals
This year, two major players are entering the Indian market, the most significant being Cisco. Cisco has introduced, telepresence meeting solution, which offers life-size images of meeting participants, high-definition video (1,080 pixel), and spatial audio. The full-duplex near-zero latency allows users to communicate in real time. Cisco has recently acquired Webex, and Latitude, which provides additional know-how of a very competitive market. Cisco's telepresence solution is generating a lot of interest in the market, and it has already got few big orders. The latest entrant in the market is Lifesize, which has got high definition videoconferencing endpoints. It has a tie-up with Radvision for MCUs. In August 2006, it established its subsidiary in India, and also announced engineering operation in Bangalore. The Bangalore design center focuses on software development, and contributes to engineering efforts across the company's high definition video product line.