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The audio video segment seemed to have escaped the wrath of the economic showdown. Total revenue stood at around Rs 230 crore in FY 2008-09 up 62% from Rs 142 crore in FY 2007-08. VOICE&DATA estimates that 60% growth of the overall AVC segment revenue came from end-point audio-video communications. And 25% came from multi-point control units (MCU); while telepresence accounted for rest of the 15%.

Polycom with the largest market share of 43.5% remained the top performer in the Indian AVC segment. The company saw most of its business coming from oil and gas sector. Tandberg followed Polycom with a market share of 15.2%. Cisco with 10.5% market share was the third leading performer in this segment. Cisco's revenue came from the telepresence business, where it was the top performer. Cisco installed more than fifty telepresence units in FY 2008-09.

The government and private sectors are both increasingly investing in videoconferencing as a tool to improve productivity and to control both tangible and intangible costs related to travel.

As a result of the growing awareness about AVC, organizations are willing to invest more in it. Industry players are now expecting demand for feature rich products among organizations in India.

High definition video equipment rather than the standard ones have gained momentum in the list of AVC technologies.

LifeSize launched a high definition audio video conferencing solution, and within three years its business has gained momentum in India. It claims to have registered 100% year-on-year growth.

But, with video being sensitive to bandwidth, there are a lot of issues which have surfaced in India. Even Cisco's TelePresence requires a minimum of 224 Mbps to run smoothly as against 512 Kbps for videoconferencing. In India, bandwidth is still not universally available, and performance gaps in networks are often glaring. Another factor is that higher bandwidth in India is available only on wireline, a luxury that only the metros can boast of.

As convergence brings voice, data and video onto the same network, new technologies are rewriting the rules of collaboration. Today, networks are becoming increasingly scalable and enterprises are realizing the benefits of having all the applications on the network. The real impact of conferencing technology can only be realized when the user's experience is close to a natural face-to-face meeting. And AVC in this respect has already started to revolutionize room based videoconferencing services.

Growth Driver
Adoption of collaborative solutions such as telepresence has grown significantly since the product was announced two years ago. With India becoming a key component of the global technology industry, telepresence solutions have found tremendous acceptance amongst companies in the vertical. In addition, other businesses with global interests or regional offices of multi-national corporations are also investing in telepresence systems to aid collaboration and to speed-up decision making.

So far, verticals that have been keen on adopting telepresence are companies that have offices in multiple locations across the nation and the globe. This makes it easier for them to justify the RoI on these solutions. Even enterprises with multiple offices within the same city are setting up telepresence rooms across the offices to help executives collaborate without the need to step out of their work premises. With high traffic congestion across Indian cities, this is definitely a big advantage in terms of the travel time being saved.

The usage of audio video conferencing has increased in sectors like the government, judiciary, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, apart from the major corporates. AVC has multiple usages such as -interviewing candidates, interaction with relatives settled abroad, reviews and meetings, product launches, press conferences, and auditioning actors.

Among enterprises, there is continued adoption of AVC solutions which are being used to facilitate communications between their knowledge workers and to increase collaboration with their customers across the globe.

Radvision saw major business coming from the government, education and defense segments. The company bagged major orders from NIC, Tripura SWAN, Tech Mahindra, L&T, Bajaj Allianz, NTPC, IDFC, i-Gate, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Kanpur, Maharashtra Engineering College and 2Corp. The biggest of all these was MCU empanelment at NIC in FY 2008-09.

Industry Outlook
There will be around 20% growth during FY 2009-10 in the AVC segment which is at present estimated to be Rs 180 crore. The external MCU business is 15% to 18% of the overall videoconferencing business. The Indian AVC market is anticipated to grow further, increasing the country's share in the Asia Pacific market from 9.4% in 2007 to 13.9% in 2014.

Cisco claims that AVC in the coming years will see three-dimensional holographic meetings replacing videoconferencing. Three-dimensional holographic conferencing will be first used at large expositions and conferences, and would later trickle down to enterprises.

According to LifeSize, the economy in the next three years will drive many companies to evaluate and implement videoconferencing technology to reduce travel expenses. LifeSize hopes that the shift will be structural and permanent. Gartner has also predicted in one of its reports that by 2012, videoconferencing will eliminate 2.1 mn airline trips annually.

Prasoon Srivastava
prasoons@cybermedia.co.in