According to Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert), in the last two years there has been an increase in the Asia-Pacific videoconferencing infrastructure market that covers six sub-regions (13 countries) in Asia-Pacific.
This increase has mostly been due to the burgeoning demand from the emerging economies of China and India, and to a lesser extent, ASEAN countries. This market includes all videoconferencing bridges or MCU (multipoint control units), gateways, gatekeepers, firewalls, NAT
(network address translation), and management and scheduling tools and software.
To keep pace with their economic growth, these countries are boosting their communications infrastructure. The overall growth in Asia-Pacific has also been attributed to the fact that mature markets such as Australia and New Zealand are also asking for complete infrastructure solutions. The analysis from Frost & Sullivan shows that the Asia Pacific videoconferencing infrastructure market earned revenues of US$80.9 million in 2007. The research firm expects this amount to reach US$245.3 million by end-2014, at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 17.2 percent (2007-2014).
Frost & Sullivan emphasizes that the videoconferencing infrastructure market is growing mainly because of the geographic expansion of organizations, especially in emerging countries. The company speaks about Greater China that accounted for 63.3 percent of the total Asia-Pac market in 2007 and boasted revenues that grew at a blistering 39.6 percent year-on-year. In India the revenues rose 28.8 percent during the same period. The bulk of domestic demand came from the government and corporate sectors in both these countries.
During the last two years, India accounted for 6.4 percent of the total revenues, Japan bagged 16.8 percent, Australasia claimed 7.7 percent, South Korea and ASEAN - each at 2.9 percent.
Pranabesh Nath, Frost & Sullivan industry analyst explained in a statement that the other major factors for the surge in demand are gradually changing work cultures that favour videoconferencing, improved network connectivity and bandwidth availability in most parts of Asia, a focus on improving productivity, and travel cost reduction.
According to Nath, this growing demand however needs to be sustained with continuously improved videoconferencing solutions and innovative features and functionality at economical prices, in order to counter competition from lower-cost audio and Web conferencing alternatives. Also, the Asia-Pacific market is more constrained by price sensitivity than North America and Europe.
Anuradha Shukla is a contributing editor for TMCnet, covering call centers, CRM and information technology. To see more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.
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