Web Conferencing: (Not) Everyone's Doing It

There is much breathless talk these days about Web conferencing and other collaborative technologies and how they are revolutionizing the workplace. But how much have they really effected the day-to-day communication of the average company?

Usage numbers seem to suggest that Web conferencing hasn't really caught on yet. A Harris Interactive poll shows that only 18 percent of offices have access to Web conferencing capabilities, though more than 23 percent of teams have members off-site. Even more telling, of those teams that have access to Web conferencing, 58 percent use it once a month or less.

Meanwhile, IT research firm Gartner notes that the Web conferencing and collaboration technology sector has been growing at a rate of more than 20 percent per year for the past three years. Gartner expects growth to remain at that level, around 22 percent to be exact, for the next three years, leaving the sector at an annual revenue number of $2.8 billion in 2010.

That would seem to place Web conferencing and other Web-based collaborative technologies in the early stages of adoption, albeit fairly well along in those early stages. Web conferencing is not so much revolutionizing the way that teams communicate as it is serving as a means for some more enterprising or in-need teams to draw in far-flung members for the more important meetings or presentations.

That having been said, Gartner expects the adoption of collaborative technologies to continue to grow at a fairly high rate. Also, they see usage outpacing revenue growth â€" which leads to the inevitable question: "Should you be Web conferencing?" Stay tuned to find out.