The global economic slowdown, in fact, helped in the growth of the VC market in India. Enterprises started cutting down on travel and started using technologies such as videoconferencing, TelePresence and WebEx.

We would say the Indian videoconferencing market is quite young. It has gone past the introductory stage and we expect the video-conferencing market to grow exponentially in the next few years.

The global economic slowdown, in fact, helped in the growth of this market in India. Enterprises started cutting down on travel and started using technologies such as video conferencing, TelePresence and WebEx to a greater extent to promote communication, productivity, reduction in travel time and costs.

According to Frost & Sullivan, the global market for video conferencing endpoints and infrastructure was worth more than USD 1.6 billion in 2008, and India contributes approximately two percent to that total, i.e., approximately USD 35.8 million.

On the growing application areas of videoconferencing

Organizations across verticals today in order to navigate difficult business conditions are exploring new opportunities. The focus here is to reduce decision times and accelerate innovation across organizational areas, supply chains, and geographic regions.

Another vertical which is showing considerable interest is the healthcare market i.e. helping to change the way healthcare is delivered. Cisco HealthPresence is an innovative patient care delivery concept that combines Cisco TelePresence and medical devices to enable caregivers and patients who may be miles apart to interact in a clinical setting.

Cisco HealthPresence is a solution that can improve costs, optimize scarce resources, and improve access to healthcare for millions of people worldwide.

On videoconferencing bridging the digital divide in India

Videoconferencing is moving beyond corporate to the government sector, judiciary, distance learning, entertainment and telemedicine. There is an increased use of videoconferencing systems for interviewing candidates, interaction with relatives settled abroad, reviews and meetings, product launches, press conferences and auditioning actors.

Videoconferencing promises applications also in healthcare, education, and government segments, as prices for hardware and bandwidth reduces and awareness about the technology spreads in the market.

Cisco has been striving to bridge a digital divide and have been quite successful with their MoU with Ashok Leyland to make intelligent vehicles. Ashok Leyland and Cisco signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) under which the companies intend to develop sector-specific solutions that help enable Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication.

The companies intend to work together to deliver solutions that will focus on transportation management, incident and emergency medical response as well as mobile security to rural and inaccessible areas of India.

The iBUS2–an emergency response centre on wheels will have HealthPresence solutions as well to provide emergency medical help to people who wouldn't have received otherwise.

On the market dynamics in the next few years

As organizations become more diverse in business applications; acquisitions and mergers become more common and multinational work forces become standard, decision makers are looking for ways to make communicating among their knowledge workers easy. Gone are the days of extended travel, waiting in long airport security lines, travel delays, inflated travel budgets and lost productivity.

At Cisco, we have deployed 673 TelePresence rooms across our global offices. We have held 478,773 meetings here till date. This has, in turn, saved us approximately USD 385 million in travel costs.

We can look at similar savings by large and small enterprises with the advent of videoconferencing. RoI on the solutions can be expected within a year itself.