Google Acquires Marratech

Google has quietly acquired Marratech, a video conferencing start-up company based in Sweden. Marratech was incorporated in 1998, has less than 20 employees and does about $1M in revenue. They were originally a spin-off from the Centre for Distance-Spanning Technology at he Lulea University of Technology.

On a personal level, I always thought WebEx might be a great acquisition target for Google but as it turns out, Cisco beat Google to the punch with a $3.2 billion acquisition of WebEx last month.

The Marratech solution is not web-based but desktop-based and has basic functionality like video, chat, whiteboard, etc. The solution includes a freely downloadable client and a server, called the Marratech Manager. The latter is available as a free server (limited to 5 users) and a licensed server.

The Google Blog stated that the acquisition was to enable Google employees, "Googlers," to share documents internally. Rather than Google building their own internal colloboration solution, they decided to buy Marratech.

Financial details have not been released as of yet.

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Blog

Comments

[Peter Stewart]

Personally, I'm quite surprised by Google's move. Marratech was a relatively obscure web conferencing player. There are over 100...but Marratech has not come up once in two years in any of the customer meetings or analyst conferences that I have been involved with...and I've attended practically all of them. My guess is that Google will rebuild 95% of the app.

[David Chao]

Jeff,

Very much doubt that the acquisition will have an impact in the market. Over the past 7 years, web conferencing companies have been acquired left and right with very little lasting effect.

Google is focused on Miscrosoft. The acquisition only demonstrates the importance of collaboration technologies.

All the best Jeff.

[Jeffrey Eisenberg]

It seems they have only acquired the technology not the company. How do you think this will affect the web conferencing market?