Today we published the Forrester Wave evaluation of Desktop Videoconferencing solutions.

Technology improvements are lowering the infrastructure and price barriers to using videoconferencing, making it available to more people and generating new applications. Employees want desktop videoconferencing because they don’t have to get up and go somewhere, reserve a room, ask for permission, deal with chargebacks, or ask for help to use it. Based on rapid adoption over the past three years we anticipate that within the next three years more than half of information workers will use desktop videoconferencing at least occasionally for work.

There are four major categories of solutions: consumer applications, unified communications (UC) clients, video pure plays, and webconferencing.

Our first evaluation of the desktop videoconferencing market includes the 10 most significant software providers in three of these categories: Avaya, Blue Jeans Network, Cisco Systems, IBM*, IOCOM, LifeSize, Microsoft, PGi, Polycom, and Vidyo

Another report we published this month, the Forrester Wave on web conferencing, evaluates solutions whose feature set prioritizes sharing content and offers videoconferencing as a secondary feature.

Leading products in our evaluation have comprehensive functionality and come from a vendor with a compelling vision for unified communications and collaboration. Some products have limited functionality but fit into an ecosystem that represents a complete solution. A few score well on the basis of being excellent standalone desktop videoconferencing solutions.

Check out the Wave for a comparison of the major categories of solutions and of course a deep dive on the strengths and weaknesses of individual products. I will be holding a webinar on October 16 to discuss the results of this evaluation, trends in videoconferencing, and best practices for product selection.

 

*We included IBM Sametime 8.5, which was available at the time of the evaluation. Sametime 9, however, was just released and represents a significant overhaul to the platform.