Which market has already demonstrated multibillion-dollar revenues (forecast to grow to more than $7.5 billion by 2016), will have a 1.3 billion-strong mobile workforce reliant on it, continues to push the envelope on business model flexibility and innovation, leads the charge on cloud adoption and has a major impact on the way in which companies conduct business with their employees, customers, partners and suppliers? Would you be surprised if I were to say conferencing and collaboration (C&C)?
How many of us were using Web-based conferencing before the term “software-as-a-service” (SaaS) was even coined? C&C providers were doing multiprotocol mashups with public switched telephone network (PSTN) audio, T.120 data and H.323 video before the concept of a Web services mashup even existed. They were also doing billing on behalf of (BoBo) for resellers more than 10 years ago. Today, this market continues to evolve in many areas, including advanced IP audio codecs and noise-canceling techniques, seamless Web control, telepresence, social networking, unified communications and virtual meeting collaboration tools such as virtual, interactive whiteboards. It has also been a market that has exhibited the greatest innovation in pricing, bundling schemes and distribution and partner strategies. For those of us providing billing and compensation for the leaders in this market, we would say, “Yes, tell us something we don’t already know.” For outsiders, all of this comes as somewhat of a surprise even as they cannot imagine a work environment that does not heavily rely on this always-there service.