Re-Evaluating the Role of “Traditional” Audio Conferencing

The adoption and use of conferencing services has grown dramatically over the past decade. Organizations of all sizes have grown to understand its value and leverage its capabilities to get the right people involved to inform, discuss, gather opinions, and make critical decisions every day. In fact, Wainhouse Research (WR) estimates 100 million people worldwide will use over 100 billion minutes of audio conferencing in 2014. A combination of need, familiarity, and new services that make conference calls easier to join and participate in is driving use and greater demand. In a Wainhouse Research survey of users, over two-thirds (68%) of respondents report their use of conferencing increased over the prior year. These per-user increases are compounded by the adoption of conferencing by more people in different roles throughout the organization – product teams for development meetings, sales for customer presentations, operations for geographic updates, finance for investor relations, management for crisis control, and a multitude of other cases.