$200 Million More in Videoconferencing Service Revenue This Year?

An Association of Corporate Travel Executives survey shows that 71 percent of its member companies plan to spend less on travel this year than in 2008.

According to the trade group, that’s a huge and unprecedented shift in corporate travel mangers’ plans from just five months ago.

ACTE’s new survey shows most companies are seeking to spend 10 percent to 20 percent less on travel than they reported in September of 2008.

Using the most conservative figures for estimating the dollar impact of such cuts, ACTE suggests that the 176 member companies responding to the survey will spend about $880 million less on travel this year than they had planned. If the same estimate is applied to the ACTE’s full membership of 2,400 companies, the impact would be more than $2 billion.

That should lead to opportunities for Web and other conferencing services and applications to get more traction, undoubtedly including many users and companies that have not historically relied on conferencing services, especially those with a video component.

Assume just 10 percent of the avoided $2 billion is spent on video-enabled conferencing services. That's a gain of $200 million in service provider revenues.