With that pesky Icelandic volcano once again dishing out clouds of ash and intermittent misery to travellers across Europe this past weekend, aviation regulators have warned of a "summer of disruption" for airline passengers.

From an outsourcing perspective, I wonder if this could be very good news for providers of managed video conferencing services?

Already, the video conferencing industry has been quick to jump on the marketing opportunity offered by 'Volcano Chaos', with leading providers quick to report a significant uptick in business during the initial April disruptions.

Some commentators have said that their eagerness to exploit the marketing opportunity of a natural disaster smacks of desperation. "To me, it suggests that most organisations are still not sold on the whole concept," said one.

I'd be inclined to agree, if it weren't for the fact that market analyst company IDC recently reported that, well before Eyjafjallajokull kicked off, sales of video conferencing equipment managed to achieve 16.7 percent growth over 2008 figures, in an otherwise sluggish year for the IT industry.

Where I DO agree is that video conferencing is still viewed as a prohibitively expensive technology by many business leaders. But if it's true that businesses face months of disruption thanks to volcanic ash from Iceland, then it seems likely that some - especially those with significant overseas interests - may be looking for a managed services approach to video conferencing, where they simply hire the equipment and it's managed for them by a third-party specialist.

It's the old capex versus opex debate that so frequently arises in discussions of outsourcing today. Companies such as mvision, for example, are building healthy businesses around bringing visual collaboration for a fixed monthly cost to organisations that are unable or unwilling to make the substantial upfront investments required to buy, install and manage their own video conferencing systems.

Perhaps the threat of ongoing Volcano Chaos in Summer 2010 will be enough to convince others to take the same tech-savvy, cost-conscious approach to tackling business travel disruption?