I would look at the market in (2) ways.
The 1st are the traditional ISDN/ H.320 players who established the market. This would include PCTL, VSVR, VTEL (who last year acquired Compression Labs - the 1st major player in this market in the mid-late 80's), LU/ Elemedia, Sony, Zydacron (primarily an OEM and still privately held) and Intel. Other players like BT and NEC seem pretty invisible today.
The 2nd group of players are the companies that have leveraged themselves on new collaboration modes. One subset of companies positioned themselves on data collaboration. Databeam (last year was acquired by IBM/ Lotus) was the most notable T.120 data collaboration vendor. RADVision, an Israeli company, has been involved in H.323/ H.320 gateway products. The insatiable appetite for VoIP and Internet telephony has created a whole separate market here. See Internet Telephony thread for range of companies. The H.323 standard was the driving force here despite the fact that H.323 was initially intended to address video conferencing and not cheap phone calls. PLCM (Polycom) got started as a high quality speakerphone product (Brian Hinman, the company's founder and CEO was a PCTL founder) and has now leveraged this strength into voice/ data and video conferencing products supporting both H.320 and H.323 standards.
Microsoft scared away a lot of players when it bundled NetMeeting into Internet Explorer for free. How does a company compete against free? Fortunately for Microsoft competitors, NetMeeting, as a software product, has had only limited success. The general Internet as a voice and/or video conferencing mechanism is still not ready for prime time. Intranets, Extranets and VPN's are another story. Company's like Cisco, Microsoft and Nortel seem to be betting billions of dollars that this is the future way to go. Corporations seem to want voice as good as the PSTN and IP network video conferencing considerable cheaper, more reliable and easier to use than ISDN H.320 video conferencing.
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