Worst result since the second quarter of 2010.
Global enterprise videoconferencing and telepresence equipment revenues dropped 13.2% during first quarter of 2013 to $563.4m, according to a new report from IDC.
Said to have registered the worst result since the second quarter of 2010, the market also experienced a 21.9% drop in revenues quarter over quarter.
During Q1, the video network infrastructure market declined 20.5%, while the multi-codec immersive telepresence, single-codec telepresence, and personal videoconferencing reported 10.7% drop year-on-year.
The market for enterprise videoconferencing and telepresence in Latin America dropped 3.5%, followed by the 9.1% decline in Asia/Pacific, with Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) reporting a 10.1% decrease year-on-year.
North America experienced a major drop of 20% year-on-year.
IDC Enterprise Communications Infrastructure senior analyst Rich Costello said that videoconferencing vendors point to longer procurement cycles, the still challenging macroeconomic situation in EMEA, and a slowdown in IT spending in some key global markets such as China and India as reasons for the challenging first quarter results.
"No doubt these are certainly valid reasons for the recent quarterly decreases in video equipment revenue we are seeing," Costello said.
"In addition, IDC believes that increasing customer considerations over more software-centric solutions, virtualization, cloud-based offerings, and real-time browser-based communications are beginning to challenge the video equipment market as well."
Cisco's videoconferencing equipment revenue dropped 17.2%, followed by Polycom with 12.4% decline.
IDC Worldwide Networking Trackers Research senior research analyst, Petr Jirovsky, said that despite another weak quarterly performance in the worldwide enterprise videoconferencing market, the video adoption is still being driven by interest in doing video integrations with vendor UC&C portfolios and business processes, as well as the increasing use of video collaboration for small workgroup, desktop, and mobile users.
"Video as a key component of collaboration continues to place high on the list of priorities for many organisations. But key questions going forward now include: How will these video collaboration solutions be deployed? With more software or hardware? And, as premise or cloud-based solutions?" Jirovsky said.