Trends in the Market
Buyers of meeting solutions are increasingly interested in converged solutions that offer embedded audio, along with video and collaborative capabilities (e.g., screen sharing, virtual whiteboards). The market’s focus has shifted away from narrow categories based on delivery mechanisms toward broader, ubiquitous access. Meeting technologies have developed in the past few years to allow users to benefit from the collaborative experiences whether they are using videoconference room systems, sitting at their desks using desktop or web clients, or accessing from mobile devices. While the cloud-based meeting solutions vendors initially focused on delivered services to PC clients and mobile apps, more care has been taken in recent years to improve ease of accessibility from videoconference room systems.
Support for Collaboration Modes
Meeting solutions are merging with asynchronous office collaboration (referred to by Gartner as “workstream collaboration”), social networking and the use of CRM applications. It is becoming more common to see capabilities associated with these areas only a single click away, to improve responsiveness and speed of collaboration with partners and customers.
Workstream collaboration applications blend multiple collaboration and communication modalities, such as messaging, content and meetings. They both augment and displace traditional meeting solutions in the enterprise by enabling more-fluid execution of nonroutine work. Examples of such applications are Cisco Webex Teams, Google Hangouts Chat, Microsoft Teams and Slack, as well as many emerging competitors.
Taken to another level, the cost-effective integration of meeting solutions with cloud office services such as Microsoft Office 365 and Google G Suite represents the additional convergence of synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. The momentum behind cloud office services is one factor exposing more end users to meeting solutions for collaboration. It also affects stand-alone meeting solution vendors, as buyers seek to optimize costs.
Integration With UCC Infrastructure
Integration of meeting solution capabilities with UCC infrastructure gives UCC vendors strong leverage in enterprises. Best-of-breed meeting solution vendors must ensure integration with UCC offerings to gain further traction in enterprises beyond individual LOBs.
The democratization of video by the use of mobile endpoints — whether through bring your own device (BYOD) or corporate-owned, privately enabled (COPE) schemes — is complicated by requirements to support multiple form factors, mobile operating systems and browsers.
Deployments of inexpensive room video systems backed by cloud-based meeting services allow IT planners to lower the cost of adoption of video capabilities.
Vendors and digital workplace leaders are paying more attention to the “huddle room” use case by addressing requirements for smaller work/conference areas that accommodate up to four people and are suitable for ad hoc collaboration.
A desire for absolute consistency of user experience in any meeting context is driving enterprises to acquire meeting solutions that support diverse endpoints. This includes digital whiteboards that, with enough sophistication, can serve as team collaboration devices.
AI Influences
Meeting solution vendors are embedding AI within their products. In this year’s Magic Quadrant, approximately 80% of the participating vendors have some version of meeting transcription, much of which is based on natural language processing (NLP) technology with AI. It is common for meeting solution vendors without their own AI technologies to integrate with mainstream technology partners such as Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft.
Some vendors are enhancing their AI portfolios through acquisition, such as Cisco, which in 2019 announced its intent to acquire Voicea. Others leverage partnerships with emerging specialist vendors such as Otter.ai. Some vendors have virtual meeting assistants or bots that automate routine work for scheduling, inviting the appropriate people, intelligent search and content management.
Webcasting Functionality
Large-scale webcasting has been the domain of specialist streaming and enterprise video content management vendors. It is increasingly common, however, for high-end meeting solution vendors to handle live streaming requirements at a more modest scale. For example, these vendors offer solutions to support a few hundred or a thousand attendees at a company town hall meeting or a quarterly shareholder meeting. It is becoming more common for these solutions to have integration into public CDNs or internal enterprise CDNs to improve video quality and reduce internet bandwidth usage.
Browser and Application Options
Rich-client applications on the desktop and native mobile apps offer the most features and functionality for presenters, more-intelligent handling of network variability, and better telemetry for service operators. Common browsers continue to increase support for more feature-rich experiences for presenters and attendees alike, leading meeting solution vendors to announce more feature parity between their rich and browser-based clients.
A common expectation is that guests in a browser-only mode with no plug-ins will receive an enjoyable experience, with the added convenience of not needing to download software to their personal devices.
Growing Expectation of Automation in Videoconference Rooms
Ease of use from videoconference rooms has long been a source of end-user frustration and a drain on IT efforts. Vendors in the meeting solution market have begun innovating to bring automated processes to the conference room, including:
Proximity detection via beacons, sensors or mobile apps to identify users as they enter the conference room, to ensure a more reliable and simpler joining experience.
Intelligent video framing of meeting participants to provide the best field of view or showcase the active speaker automatically.
Virtual meeting assistants with speech recognition to drive meeting processes and content management tasks.
Background noise cancellation/HD audio to improve overall audio experience.
Facial recognition for logging attendance or identifying speakers.
The Freemium Influence
The influence of the freemium model, which has fueled rapid growth for vendors such as LogMeIn and Zoom, remains strong in this market.
With this type of model, vendors use free services for smaller, less-complex meetings to drive viral adoption of their platforms, often by LOBs. They then upsell more-complex enterprise features, such as higher capacity, integration with room video systems and provisioning via directories, which appeal to IT and procurement buyers.
Enthusiastic uptake of the freemium model has contributed to downward pricing pressure in the meeting solution market. In addition, exposure to free or inexpensive offerings from vendors such as Microsoft and Google has increased users’ familiarity and comfort with chat, video and content sharing. Furthermore, the consumerization of IT has encouraged broader adoption of meeting technology within enterprises.
