Regular Backbone contributor Ian Harvey had a very interesting article published in the Globe and Mail Small Business Section titled "Is it real, or is it video conference?" about some of the recent breakthroughs in videoconferencing from two notable companies, HP's Halo and industry stalwart Cisco. Having not followed the videoconferencing industry closely, I was taken aback by the fact that in 2005 the overall industry was valued at 1.15 billion globally and is expected to grow to 3.1 billion by 2010.  Research firm Gartner Inc. sees even further value in videoconferencing, as an industry, and estimates that the sector will be worth over 12.1 billion by 2011, alone.

If you ask me, the real beauty part is that all of the breakthroughs in the industry ultimately lead towards one thing specifically- a price reduction. More money being spent on videoconferencing will ultimately make the technology more widespread and therefore, more affordable.

Large-scale videoconferencing is a truly enterprise-level solution. Ian quotes Guy Welty's description of how videoconferencing saves his company, W.R Grace (a global chemical supplier with annual sales valued at 2.5 billion) "Sending two high-level executives to Asia is two days each of downtime with the travelling. This is much more effective."

Increasingly, videoconferencing is being marketed towards the SMBs as a way to increase productivity and collaboration. Methinks that the internet's growing reliance on collaborative media leads us to an obvious conclusion- videoconferencing will soon be built into our every day internet applications once the technology becomes cheap enough. In fact, videoconferencing solutions for Joe Average can cost anywhere from 50-200 bucks.

You can also have a look at Ian's article in our Top 300 issue titled "Why CEOs Should Blog."

Andrew Rideout