New data from the IDC research group (www.idc.com) showed first quarter 2013 (1Q13) videoconferencing equipment revenue declined 13.2% year over year and 21.9% quarter over quarter. Total worldwide enterprise videoconferencing and telepresence equipment revenue was US$563.4 million in 1Q13, its worst result since the second quarter of 2010, according to IDC.

From a market segment perspective, endpoints, which include multi-codec immersive telepresence, single-codec telepresence, and personal videoconferencing, declined 10.7% year over year and video network infrastructure decreased 20.5% year over year in 1Q13.

Regionally, Latin America declined just 3.5% year over year, followed by the 9.1% year-over-year decline in Asia/Pacific and the 10.1% decrease in Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). North America was a particular area of weakness this quarter with its 20.3% year-over-year drop.

"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," says Rich Costello, senior analyst, Enterprise Communications Infrastructure at IDC. "No doubt these are certainly valid reasons for the recent quarterly decreases in video equipment revenue we are seeing. 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 1Q13 videoconferencing equipment results showed a 17.2% year-over-year decline in revenue versus the particularly strong 1Q12. Cisco remains the worldwide video equipment market leader with 43.4% of the market in 1Q13, down slightly from both 1Q12 and 4Q12.

Polycom's 1Q13 videoconferencing equipment revenue decreased 12.4% quarter over quarter, and 11.2% year over year, both values being better than the overall market performance. Polycom's worldwide video equipment market share stands at 26.5%, up from 23.6% in 4Q12, as the vendor introduced a range of new video products and services to the market in 2012.

"Despite another weak quarterly performance in the worldwide enterprise videoconferencing market, we still see video adoption 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," says Petr Jirovsky, senior research analyst, Worldwide Networking Trackers Research, IDC. "Video as a key component of collaboration continues to place high on the list of priorities for many organizations. 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?"