While email allows information to be passed quickly and efficiently, there is still a general consensus that, in business, sometimes nothing beats a face-to-face meeting.
But how do you arrange a rendezvous between Finance in London, HR in New York, and Sales in Hong Kong, without breaking the bank on travel expenses?
The globalization of business has necessitated development of solutions that allow people to communicate and share information quickly, in real-time. This has led to growing popularity of virtual events, with the market growing at a CAGR of 21.55 percent over the next four years.
Virtual events are online exhibitions or marketplaces that can including everything from breakout sessions to video conferencing and web conferencing, collaboration tools and social networking. They allow for real-time collaboration and information sharing, while offering an economical alternative to pricey business trips.
While there are a significant number of companies offering a slew of products under the virtual events umbrella, Microsoft Corp., IBM Corp., and Cisco Systems Inc. are hands down three of the largest, with the most wide-ranging product portfolios.
Vendor Spotlight: Microsoft Corp.
It doesn’t really need much introduction—if you’ve ever worked in a corporate environment, chances are you’ve come across at least one Microsoft product. The company provides instant messaging and presence facilities, conferencing facilities, enterprise voice facilities, office integration, and mobile applications. These products give end-users real-time presence information including photos, availability, and location, and helps them create, moderate, and join audio, video, and web meetings.
One of Microsoft’s key products is Office 365. This software does well in that it builds on what businesses already know. It’s the same Microsoft Office that we love to hate but powered by the cloud, making information easily accessible to all employees. It also offers online conferencing, presence and IM capabilities to keep everyone connected.
Vendor Spotlight: IBM Corp.
IBM Corp’s social software, IBM Connections, is considered one of the leading enterprise social networking platforms on the market. It provides social networking and analytics, integrates well with other IBM software and third-party applications as well as Microsoft applications, and offers several layers of security for organizational data.
On top of IBM Connections, the company offers other collaboration products like IBM Mobile Connect, IBM Mobile Portal Accelerator, Lotus EasySync Pro, Lotus Mobile Connect, WebSphere Everyplace Custom Environment, and WebSphere Everyplace Micro Environment.
Vendor Spotlight: Cisco Systems Inc.
Cisco Systems Inc. is another leading vendor in the market offering video and web conferencing applications primarily to enterprises and SMEs. The company’s major product portfolio includes communication infrastructure, customer collaboration, IP telephony, unified communications (UC) applications, UC network management, and UC systems, licensing, and subscription.
Cisco also provides the WebEx Meeting Center for enabling web conferencing, which helps organizations collaborate with their customers, partners, and employees worldwide and facilitates information sharing for enhanced productivity.
As companies demand better and better solutions for video and audio conferencing, and market vendors respond with new product suites including mobile applications, the market will continue to see significant growth from now through 2018.
For more insights including market drivers, challenges and trends, view our Global Virtual Events Market 2014-2018 report.
