NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The total US audio and web conferencing market was $1.5 billion in 2009, AMI research estimates. Web conferencing is expected to drive spending over the next five years, boasting a 22% CAGR, while audio conferencing is expected to grow a more modest 4% YOY, according to a new report titled “Audio and Web Conferencing: Usage, Spending, Distribution, Market and Growth.”

“In our view, the key drivers and motivators to support audio and web conferencing adoption include businesses’ greater interest in opex savings (vs. cap ex); productivity improvement, mobility/telecommuting; and convenient collaborative communications.”

The report indicates the total market for audio and web conferencing will grow at a five-year CAGR of 12% to $2.7 billion in 2014. In fact, most small businesses plan to use audio conferencing over the next 12 months, according to this report.

“Audio conferencing tends to be more widely installed than web conferencing by SMBs,” said Karen Nielsen, Senior Consultant at AMI-Partners. “The SB market leads the growth in conferencing spending. We would expect the greatest growth in usage for both audio and web conferencing to come from the small business segment with under 100 employees.”

The report addresses key areas pertaining to web and audio conferencing adoption/plans, spending forecast/outlook, purchase channels for conferencing services, conferencing market structure/players (including AT&T, Cisco, Microsoft, iVocalize, DimDIm, and Zoho Meeting), and implications for growth and outlook. Employee size and vertical industry perspectives are provided as well.

“In our view, the key drivers and motivators to support audio and web conferencing adoption include businesses’ greater interest in opex savings (vs. cap ex); productivity improvement, mobility/telecommuting; and convenient collaborative communications.”

“On the other hand, there are several inhibitors to conferencing adoption. Market confusion/knowledge gap (SMBs don’t fully understand the suite of conferencing solutions); over-packaging of conferencing solutions (SMBs are more comfortable buying gradually); and SMBs being not quite able to discern the business justification and focus instead on the costs,” said Ms. Nielsen.

As UC continues to proliferate in the SMB space, AMI will be publishing several related studies, including “Video Conferencing, Hosted VoIP, CPE-IP-PBX Adoption Market Opportunity and Outlook” and “Smart Phones and Mobile Applications,” among others.

For more information about the above studies, AMI-Partners, or our global SMB research, call 212-944-5100, e-mail ask_ami@ami-partners.com or visit www.ami-partners.com.

About Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc.

AMI-Partners specializes in IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services strategy, venture capital, and actionable market intelligence — with a strong focus on global small and medium businesses (SMBs), and extending into large enterprises and home-based businesses. The AMI-Partners mission is to empower clients for success with the highest quality data, business strategy perspectives and ―go-to-market solutions. Led by Andy Bose, the firm has built a world-class management team with deep experience cutting across IT, telecommunications and business services sectors in established and emerging markets.

AMI-Partners has helped shape the go-to-market SMB strategies of more than 150 leading IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services companies. The firm is well known for its IT and Internet adoption-based segmentation of the SMB markets; its annual retainership services based on global SMB tracking surveys in more than 25 countries; and its proprietary database of SMBs and SMB channel partners in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The firm invests significantly in collecting survey based information from several thousand SMBs annually, and is considered the premier source for global SMB trends and analysis.