Will SMB Video Conferencing Take Off? Much Depends on the Providers

There has been considerable controversy over whether the SMB (small to medium-size business) video conferencing market is about to take off. That's understandable: video conferencing has been a lot of false starts in the past. The recent VoIP Evolution report on the topic describes a number of signs the takeoff is imminent. These include the success of higher-end video conferencing products, the growing popularity of cloud-based services in general, the success of hosted VoIP, the runaway growth of consumer video chat and others. Also persuasive is the number of competitors jumping into the market: there were eight significant announcements in June and July alone.

The report also notes, however, that there are no hard statistics that prove there's a sizeable potential market just waiting for the right solution. No research firms have measured the actual number of video conferencing users among SMBs. More important, some of the most interesting offerings are so new there has been little or no time to assess their impact or potential for success. Similarly, no one has surveyed SMBs to find out whether they even want to have video conferences as a routine part of their activities. In short, the competitors that have jumped into the market have done so based on considered judgment rather than hard evidence.

That doesn't mean they're mistaken, only that they're entrepreneurial. In some cases they're startups for whom substantial risk is an acceptable price to pay for the possibility of more-than-substantial reward. In others they are established players with both the resources and the determination to stick it out long enough to see whether substantial investment in the market will pay off. Either way, they have to have a substantial tolerance for uncertainty.

They also have to get it right. That means developing video conferencing products and services tailored to the particular needs of SMBs, rather than recycling enterprise systems for delivery from the cloud. It also may mean coming up with flexible new combinations of video conferencing, video calling, collaboration tools and the like. Most of all, it will require a new way of thinking that moves beyond both the old and the new conventional wisdom about what video conferencing should be.