The Web Conferencing Blog

Cisco’s Vision: Five Future Technology Trends

Cisco CEO John Chambers and CTO Padmasree Warrior say the role of the network is transforming to a point that enables the connections of people, devices, and information. Some of the top trends that they see in the coming years are:

1. Wireless and wired networking will provide access to support the rapid growth of devices and mobility.
2. Virtualization and cloud services will deliver content while providing a lower cost of ownership. This is why Cisco is now migrating most of its own business applications to data center virtualization.
3. The ability to quickly and easily collaborate between customers, staff, vendors, etc., no matter where people are, will transform business processes.
4. Video conferencing, the cornerstone of collaboration, already proves to be particularly powerful for doing business at a distance, both locally and globally.
5. Network security elements will converge, resulting in seamless connections and context-aware security that recognizes who you are, what you’re supposed to have access to, what device you’re on, and where you are globally.
6. A network technology architecture will connect any device across any combination of networks, increase cost efficiency by integrating network security and management, and improve business processes, including energy management.

LogMeIn Acquires Bold Software for $16.5M

LogMeIn, the longtime maker of remote access tools, has acquired Bold Software, a provider of web chat and customer communications software. The company says it will use the technology to offer additional features and capabilities to its customers on LogMeIn Rescue, the company’s support product.

Under the terms of the deal, LogMeIn acquired all the net assets of Bold Software for approximately $16.5 million in cash.

A portion of the cash is contingent on retention-based bonuses and is expected to be paid over time.  LogMeIn expects the acquisition to be accretive to its non-GAAP operating results within twelve months and will provide more details regarding the financial terms of the transaction during its fourth quarter 2011 financial results conference call.

The acquisition is a part of a larger strategy to expand LogMeIn’s portfolio of web-based services aimed at customer care organizations, the company says, including call centers, external help desks, and customer service teams.

For those unfamiliar, Bold Software’s “BoldChat” product is a live chat and click-to-call customer service solutions that is used by thousands of retail, financial services, manufacturing, software, and telecommunications organizations. Meanwhile, LogMeIn’s customer care services are used by tens of thousands of helpdesks and call centers, including  50 of the world’s top mobile operators and support organizations like Best Buy’s Geek Squad and OEMs like Sling Media.

Post-acquisition, BoldChat will still be available as a standalone offering, while it will also be integrated into other LogMeIn products, in addition to LogMeIn Rescue.

(by Sarah Perez, TechCrunch)

Beat Your Competition

With tremendous market opportunity comes increased competition. When you look at the total available market opportunity for Collaboration, it's a $40B market! Cisco, a market leader in Telepresence, Contact Center, Web Conferencing, is looking to capture more of the Collaboration market share by expanding its portfolio into instant messaging, enterprise social collaboration and enterprise content management. At the same time, Microsoft and IBM, both with strong presence in email and team collaboration are looking to take market share from the areas where Cisco have market leadership. On the periphery, Google, Salesforce.com, Oracle, are looking patiently waiting for the right opportunity to capitalize on.

With all this competition, how does one win? What can you do to increase your win ratio against the competition?

1. Differentiate on all level. Differentiate your company, your product and yourself. Your company must be viewed as reputable, your product must be higher quality, easier to use, more reliable. You have to ask better thought provoking questions and be a perceived industry expert while understanding your customer's business. Years ago, I blogging about Do Commodity Products Exist? and it's worth a read as it focuses on differentiation.

2. Focus on your strengths and downplay your weaknesses. How and when to leverage your strengths? Read Sales Strategies

3. Qualify your opportunities, disqualify your opportunities even faster. Read Sales Secret #1 from Top Sales Secrets

4. Attitude and confidence. Exude so much confidence in your company, product and yourself that your customer feels compelled to do business with you because it minimizes their perceived risks.

5. Be creative. Find ways to get your customer to say "yes." Can you add something to your proposal to make it of higher value to your customer? Is there something you can offer that your competition cannot?

Other sales-related posts: 

• Top Sales Secrets
• Do Commodity Products Exist?
• Sales Strategies

Oracle Buys RightNow for $1.5B

Robin Wauters reported on TechCrunch that this morning Oracle announced it has acquired RightNow – both companies are listed on NASDAQ – for $43 per share or roughly $1.5 billion net of RightNow’s cash and debt. With the acquisition, Oracle is adding a robust cloud-based customer service offering (see graph below) to its own Public Cloud solution – more info on that here. RightNow’s share price closed at $35.96 last week, so the deal represents a premium of roughly 20 percent on its closing price on Friday the 21st of October.

RightNow’s solutions help companies handle customer interactions across a multitude of channels, including call and contact centers, the Web and social networks.

Its products are used by nearly 2,000 organizations across the globe, the company says.

Founded in 1997, RightNow went public in 2004. The company boasted a market cap of $1.2 billion at market close last week.

The acquisition by Oracle is expected to close later this year or in early 2012. As usual, the transaction is subject to a number of things, including RightNow stockholder approval, regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

Oracle has closed 6 acquisitions this year. While its takeovers of RightNow and Endeca are pending, the company has completed the purchases of Datanomic, FatWire, Inquira, Ndevr, Ksplice and Pillar Data Systems in 2011 alone.

Cisco Rules SaaS UC Conferencing Market

WebEx gives Cisco a 58% share of the second quarter SaaS unified communications webconferencing market, reports Synergy research.

A Synergy Research Group report released this week shows that Cisco's WebEx conferencing service is driving the market for unified communications (UC) software applications.

According to the report, the UC market grew by almost 11%, to just over $1 billion in the second quarter of this year, compared to the year-ago quarter. The growth was driven in large part by a 27% increase in the desktop conferencing apps market and, within that segment, by a 33% jump in software-as-a-service-delivered conferencing apps revenue.

Cisco Systems rules the SaaS conferencing market with a 58% share, due mostly to its WebEx Conferencing Service. 

"This business unit pushes the needle," said Jeremy Duke, Synergy's founder and principal analyst. "When there was discussion in early summer that Cisco would be possibly divesting WebEx, I thought it was absolutely ridiculous."

Conferencing has quickly become an acepted way of conducting business meetings, Duke said. Meeting by videoconference avoids the time, expense, and environmental impact of air travel and enables collaboration by different people often working at distant locations. And Saas-baed conferencing is a key component of an overall unified communications platform. The UC applications market that Synergy tracks in this report includes unified messaging, contact centers, presence, instant messaging, and conferencing.

Cisco's 58% share dwarfs that of number-two Citrix (12.98%), whose service is called GoToMeeting, and number-three Microsoft (10.94%), provider of Office Live Meeting.

SaaS is by far the delivery method of choice for webconferencing software, accounting for 76% of all UC conferencing app revenue, versus 14.5% for on-premises software and 9.86% for on-premises audio, which is tracked separately. Synergy forecasts that annual revenue from SaaS-based webconferencing will double over the next five years, said Duke. For all UC apps, SaaS accounted for 36% of revenue in the second quarter, a 33% increase from the second quarter of 2010.

Cisco also lead the overall UC applications market in the second quarter with $351 million in revenue, followed by Avaya ($149 million), Microsoft ($105 million), Alcatel-Lucent ($69 million), and Citrix ($49 million).

By Robert Mullins, InformationWeek