Research and Markets: The European Audio Conferencing Services Market: A Plethora of New Opportunities Emerges in Europe's Diverse Market

DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/4308cb/european_audio_con) has announced the addition of Frost & Sullivan's new report "European Audio Conferencing Services Market" to their offering.

This research services provides an updated view of the European market for audio conference services, and complements the 2010 European web conferencing services market study. It offers a description the major market trends and dynamics, and important technology trends. The study analyses the two major market segments - unattended service and attended service - and provides forecasts of demand, pricing and revenue for each of these up to 2016. Additionally, an analysis of the adoption of audio conferencing services throughout the major market-regions of Europe is presented, and consideration of the factors leading to different rates of growth is given.

Plethora of New Opportunities Emerges

Despite the growing capabilities of on-premise collaboration applications, the long-established market for audio conferencing services continues to flourish. The European markets - with all their diversity - present services providers with numerous new development opportunities. Both attended and unattended conferencing types are showing growth potential.

The combination of an economic downturn, a need to demonstrate action on CO2 emissions, and a call for increased productivity has created a growing need for audio conferencing services, says the analyst of this research. While audio conferencing services have been available in Europe for over thirty years, the more recent development in unified communications and collaboration applications - coupled with the massive marketing efforts behind these products - has helped generate greater awareness about the benefits of cloud-based collaboration services across Europe.

The huge investments in promoting all types of collaboration products and services - made by the world's leading communications technology vendors and service providers - are highlighting the vital role collaboration plays in helping organisations cut costs and improve productivity. Audio conferencing is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to deploy and use available collaboration solutions. It is perfectly suited to meet the growing demand for collaboration in both the more advanced and still emerging European markets.

Europe's Diversity Offers Both Opportunities and Challenges

Despite the potential growth opportunity in most of the country markets in Europe, fierce price competition is a key factor in the more developed markets of the United Kingdom, France and Germany. Service providers face the twin challenges of maintaining margins and share in their primary markets, while selectively targeting their investments at the most promising emerging markets and sectors.

Europe is a far less homogeneous market than North America, and presents additional challenges by its very linguistic and cultural diversity. Equally, while helping to promote awareness of audio conferencing as an option, the newly developed unified communications and collaboration products and services pose a significant competitive threat.

There is intense price competition as service providers target the largest customers of audio conferencing services, impacting their margins, remarks the analyst. At the same time, they are keen on developing new opportunities - such as the potentially lucrative yet hard to crack SMB segment, and the emerging markets across Europe - and defending margins by adding further value to existing services.

The sheer diversity of growth opportunities available in the Europe creates some interesting challenges for providers of audio conferencing services wanting to expand, concludes the analyst. However, a number of service providers are already addressing these challenges, through carefully selective use of acquisition, start-up and partnering activities.

Market Sectors:

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