The market for communication conferencing services is continuing to grow rapidly worldwide and is expected to reach $14 billion in sales by 2005. A portion of this growth can be attributed to the desire of corporations to reduce capital and operating expenses, and lost productivity of business travel. However, many organizations that initially invested in conferencing solutions for such short-term, tactical reasons are finding that conferencing (audio, Web and video) delivers significant, long-term, strategic business values far beyond initial expectations. Businesses are aggressively expanding the use of conferencing throughout the enterprise.

In the last few years, changes in the business environment have made it increasingly difficult for organizations to manage time, business relationships effectively and efficiently. Markets have become more global, with significant activities in manufacturing, services outsourcing and off-shoring. Companies of all sizes have continued to expand internationally. Strategic alliances, partnerships, and joint ventures are ubiquitous. Workers are more mobile than ever; as there are 1.2B mobile subscribers globally. Telecommuting and remote working are an everyday reality, and the population of road warriors is growing. Business has become a 24x7 activity anywhere, any time.

A growing array of technologies has emerged to help bridge the gaps between people, time, and geography. These include both synchronous and asynchronous technologies, such as e-mail. It began as a departmental text-messaging tool a decade ago, and now is the dominant form of global asynchronous communications for businesses and residences. E-mail and voice mail are by far the most ubiquitous and widely used partly because they have been around longer and partly because they take advantage of the two most popular desktop tools for business: the telephone and the personal computer. After all, if a person is already using a telephone and a PC, it does not take much additional effort, investment, or skill to learn how to use email and voice mail. E-mail and voice mail have become indispensable business communications tools. However, they are both asynchronous technologies that is, they dont support simultaneous communications that limits the user capabilities they support.

Unlike email and voice mail, conferencing technologies support synchronous communications, bringing greater interactivity, immediacy, and a more natural collaboration experience to their users. The characteristics of each conferencing technology make it suited to its own set of applications and uses. Eagle Conferencing provides a full range of features for audio, Web, and video conferencing.

Corporations of all sizes - small, medium and large - in the public, private and educational sectors around the world, are benefiting from conferencing technology. Whether a corporation has a staff 1 or 10,000, it will be more productive, better connected, and more satisfactory if incoming transactions (calls, e-mails, chat session and faxes) are managed by a conference when needed. Conferencing is interactive, real-time communication among three or more people via voice and/or data networks.

In summary, the service provider model such as Eagle Conferencing, is growing rapidly, because it offers organizations a low-risk environment for a number of users. With availability of audio, Web and video conferencing capabilities, organizations have the opportunity to measure the operational benefits and adoption levels of a technology and features, thereby developing an understanding of the opportunity.