Greg Galitzine - VoIP Blog: In Light of Higher Gas Prices, Consider This

Greg Galitzine of TMCnet.com writes in his blog about the potential for high fuel costs to spur a growth in virtual collaboration tools such as web conferencing.

He provides quite a bit of market data showing the potential for growth in the IP conferencing space. He also notes that to accommodate the growing interest in IP-based conferencing and collaboration, the Internet Telephony Expo conference, run by TMC.net in October in Los Angeles, has added a "Conferencing and Collaboration over IP Summit" to its agenda.

I tend to think however that the growing in IP conferencing and collaboration will be driven more by the desire to improve the communications among virtual workgroups rather than on desire to reduce travel or travel costs. The reality of enterprise organizations today is that workforces are increasingly distributed and the primary means of collaboration are e-mail and audio conferencing. The growing capabilities of IP conferencing and collaboration solutions offers a great deal of potential to improve the capabilities of these virtual teams.

It's obvious the vendors in the IP telephony and conferencing spaces see real-time collaboration as a major growth area.