Conference Call Audio Web

The audio conferencing services market is continuously converging with other growing conferencing services such as Web conferencing and Video conferencing. This trend helps the audio conferencing market to maintain its steady and moderate growth. Also, there is a shift in end-user preference from scheduled or unattended conferencing to an on demand (reservation less) conferencing. This feature helps to reduce the time involved in setting up the conference.

According to Frost & Sullivan's U.S. Audio Conferencing Services Market, services market generated revenue of $2.25 billion in 2004. Total market revenue is expected to reach $3.13 billion by 2011. Enterprises of all sizes are increasingly making more conference calls than ever before as indicated by the increase in minutes. In fact, the minutes are projected to swell from 14.53 billion in 2003 to nearly 35 billion in 2010. This surge in minutes is expected to create a demand for more ports, not only from service providers but also large enterprises that would like to conduct conferencing in-house.

These projections indicate that telephone traffic volume will grow at about 10%, while services revenue will only grow at about 5%. The market dynamics will intensify the competition for revenue per minutes use. Service providers will be required to come-up with new marketing innovations and operating efficiency to manage pressure on profit margins. This has compelled market vendors to focus on functions, reliability, convergence, and integration as product differentiators in the increasingly commoditized market.

The market transition to IP has ignited the convergence of audio, data, and video conferencing into an integrated solution, promising to render the concept of stand-alone audio conferencing obsolete. Service providers with integrated conferencing capabilities can sell more minutes at a higher price when services are bundled.

Eagle Teleconferencing, a customer-centric service provider, immediately realized that IP based Web conferencing and video conferencing services could provide a incremental revenue opportunity through satisfying customer needs as well as exploring new applications such as in-stream advertising. Streaming media allows delivering message, live or recorded, to be broadcasted to audience world using the power of Internet.

Eagle Teleconferencing is focusing its future development efforts towards delivering converged services in order to meet customer needs. By providing a converged conferencing service, providers are able to add a level of differentiation to their reservation less and operator-assisted conferencing services.

Converged networking for Eagle Teleconferencing has resulted in both cost savings and efficacy requirements because only one network is deployed, maintained and managed. Since IP connections are ubiquitous throughout the enterprise conference rooms and to every enterprise desktop, scaling audio and video over IP applications is easy because the network is already deployed, debugged, up and running.

Eagle Teleconferencing's goal is to continuously grow with satisfying customer needs globally.

Praful Shah is a seasoned telecom professional with diversified telecom management and operations experience. Currently, he is the VP-of Corporate Development at EagleACD. He has held increasingly responsible positions, first in R&D at Johnson & Johnson (where he was awarded a patent for his work) and Bell Labs. Then, he shifted to marketing roles at AT&T including the development of marketing strategies for Europe, India and the Middle East, video on demand for the US market and finally global data and voice network operations, establishing contracts with various telephone companies. His volunteer works includes designing, developing and implementing Computer Technology Park and Outsourcing Center for disabled youngsters in India. He has a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin, and a Masters degree in Business Administration from Rider University.