Teleconferencing growing, evolving

Despite frustrations such as long PIN numbers, waiting for participants to connect and differing time zones, teleconferencing continues to experience spectacular growth.

"In the last four to five years the audio and Web conferencing services has grown from a $2 billion to a $4 billion industry, and is expected to reach $6 billion by 2011," said Marc Beattie at Wainhouse Research. "The price has been coming down but revenue in the industry has been going up."

According to a Wainhouse Research study, the growth for collaboration services has been driven mainly by demand for group meetings without the cost and loss of productivity associated with travel. The average per minute prices for operator-unattended services have dropped 42 percent during the last four years.

Kelly Parthen, spokeswoman for Agilent Technologies, said that her company, because of its global reach, is very dependent on teleconferencing.

"I don't have direct insight into the cost, but we do know that it does save us a lot on travel," she said. "As we are going through a big upgrade in our building, we are looking into video teleconferencing to connect us with our main sites overseas."

And because of increased competition, more options and simpler methods are being developed to expand the oft-used business collaboration tool.

Vello Corp is a new player in the industry. Its spin on teleconferencing is to call participants, eliminating the need for lengthy PIN numbers.

"The things that Vello is doing are interesting. They are making it a whole lot easier to get into a conference call," Beattie said.

Other companies making waves in the industry are Ring2, which has operations centers in Europe and the United States, and Canada- based iotum.

Ring2 provides reservationless dial-in conferencing with remote access to initiate and control a conference call from a BlackBerry smartphone, a Windows Mobile device or the Web. Iotum offers free conference calling through Facebook, allowing users to see who is on the conference call and receive text message reminders.

But not everyone is sold yet on PINless conference calling.

"We have that option, but we just don't have many that want to use that option," said Randy Leigh, chief technology officer of the conferencing unit for Premier Global Services, which has 20 years of experience serving Fortune 500 corporations and smaller to mid-size companies. "Ease of use has to be balanced with security at all times."

He said the challenge is to make teleconferencing as easy as possible while respecting the security.

"They are kind of using the phone number as a password," Leigh said. "Anybody who had that phone number could get in."

Mark Dzwonczyk, chief operating officer and president of Vello, admitted that fraud is always an issue, but said fraudulent uses so far have been extremely low.

Jose Quiros, vice president of worldwide sales and marketing for Colorado Springs-based TeleMatrix, Inc. and Scitec, Inc., said he hasn't had any problems with security -- and he can see when someone tries to sneak out of a call.

TeleMatrix and Scitec are Vello beta customers.

TeleMatrix has designed and manufactured telecommunications equipment since 1985, and Scitec Inc. is a certified Minority Business Enterprise supplying telephones to the hospitality industry since 1993. The companies merged last year.

Quiros said he is on six or seven set conference calls a week, and that he likes the system's ease of use.

"Before, I had to remember my subscriber number, and if I didn't remember my bridge, everyone was waiting on hold," he said.

Copyright 2007 Dolan Media Newswires
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