The Web Conferencing Blog

Cisco Telepresence

Cisco Telepresence is a new technology that combines high-definition video with rich audio and interactive components to replicate an in-person meeting but delivered over the network. For larger enterprises, Cisco Telepresence will set a new standard for business communications.

Get a real-life visual of what Telepresence looks like. Cisco Telepresence Video

Business Benefits:

Employees derive both personal and professional benefits using Cisco TelePresence. This drives greater productivity in several ways. Employees:

• Spend less time out of the office
• Increase the number of interactions they can have with co-workers, partners, and customers
• Derive the maximum value out of each interaction through richer and more valuable communication
• Extend and maintain key business relationships in between in-person visits

David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

AT&T Buys Interwise

As predicted, 2007 has been a year of consolidation for web collaboration companies/technologies.

Google and Marratech for undisclosed amount
Cisco and WebEx Communications for $3.2 billion

Now, AT&T acquires Interwise for $121M. Interwise has about 130 employees with $20M in sales revenue and based in Cambridge, MA.

AT&T said that it expects to retain the Interwise management team, which is headed by Frank Zvi, co-founder, president, and CEO of Interwise. The company's domestic and international operations also are expected to be retained, AT&T said.

Thanks,

David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

Cisco's Agent Model for WebEx

Cisco is formalized a channel strategy to sell WebEx via an Agent Model starting next year. Keith Goodwin, SVP of Worldwide Channels at Cisco has been tasked with putting together the channel strategy to help scale WebEx globally.

The goal is to compensate partners for reselling WebEx on standard 12 month or 24 month terms. Cisco captures and recognized revenue for at least a year and the partner receives a fee based on the annual term. (This agency model is new to Cisco.)

"We're going to give partners the equivalent or more of the margin they might make on a product by giving partners 20 percent of the value of the contract for the first year upfront when the customer signs the contract." said Edison Peres, Cisco VP and chief go-to-market officer for Worldwide Channels(The WebEx agent program will only be made available to Cisco partners that are certified in unified communications products.)

Cisco is in the process of identifying partners to include in a pilot of the agent program, which likely will run for about six months, Goodwin said.

"As is typical with us, we want to pilot it, listen to the partners on how it works, and tune it before we scale it out to the rest of the partners," Goodwin said.

It will be very interesting to see how this model plays out. If you think about it, WebEx has always been a direct sales model and over the past 8 years, the company has launched itself into a dominant market leadership role without having to rely or leverage on a globally dispersed partner program. The fact that WebEx can now lean on an established and world class channel program is scary if you think about the upside.

Thanks,
David Chao
Thew Web Conferencing Expert

IBM Acquires WebDialogs

IBM has acquired WebDialogs, a web conferencing provider in MA, that has managed to stay in business since its inception in 1998 by offering its services to more established companies to resell under their own brand. Through the acquisition, IBM has rebranded WebDialogs to "Unyte," and will be part of the IBM Software Lotus division.

Financial terms have not been disclosed, which typically means that it is not an amount worth mentioning or touting on the Internet.

I suspect that acquisition was a reaction to Cisco acquiring WebEx this past May for $3.2 billion. IBM has had a foot in the web collaboration space for years now with its IBM SameTime application. SameTime is an on-premise solution that traditionally works well within the firewall but once you try to tunnel out, it's complicated and unreliable.

IBM's positioning is most likely around the fact that they can now offer SameTime to its large enterprise companies while marketing Unyte, a hosted solution, to smaller businesses. This is yet another example of a large enterprise software company trying to get a foothold into the Software as a Service (SaaS) space.

To remain competitive, companies are converging voice, video, and data into a unified communications platform. I understand IBM's collaboration strategy and as much as it is on point, it is difficult to execute strategy with products and applications that have a track record for being cumbersome, unreliable, and not widely accepted in the marketplace. (IBM SameTime has about a 5% market share while WebDialogs has less that 0.01% market share in the web conferencing space)

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Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

Convoq becomes Zingdom Communications

Convoq has decided to pursue different business ventures and will discontinue its web collaboration focus. Below is from Christopher Herot's personal blog. Christopher is co-founder of Convoq.

Convoq, Inc., the company Chuck Digate and I co-founded in 2002, has been renamed Zingdom Communications, Inc.  to reflect our new direction and new product line.  Chuck has moved on, but over the past five years the company built an extremely talented and cohesive engineering team that pioneered the use of Flash and AJAX in real-time audio, video, instant messaging, and other forms of real-time communications.  Our first product, ASAP, put these resources to use in the context of corporate collaboration.  Now we are organizing the company around a new opportunity in more personal, one-on-one communication, concentrating initially on the telephone.

Voice communications have evolved considerably since the days of The Phone Company.  AT&T has been broken up and reassembled and the locus of innovation has shifted away from the traditional providers of local loops to a new wave of companies who offer services that offer new ways of connecting people to each other.  In this new paradigm, connectivity itself has become a commodity, although voice can be transported over the Internet or a wireless connection in addition to the traditional copper, and it is supplemented by instant messaging, SMS, email, and video.  The voice on the other end of the line can be a person or a robot.  In this world, the issues become finding the right person, allowing that person to control his or her privacy, and providing context that helps a person decide whether to answer the phone and be prepared when the conversation begins.

With all the progress that has been made, real-time communications applications are still a challenge to construct and deploy.  Unlike the typical web application which navigates from page to page, a communications app must deal with events at both ends of the conversation.  It's not enough to wait for a screen refresh to reflect that the party at the other end has closed the connection, but building a fully interactive AJAX application is a lot of work.  Our intention at Zingdom is to provide real-time voice communication through a compelling user experience, and to enable partners to provide that same level of experience in their applications without needing to become experts in either telephony or AJAX.  I'll say more about where we came from and were we are going in future installments.  In the meantime, feel free to check out zing.dm.

http://herot.typepad.com/cherot/2007/08/convoq-becomes-.html

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Mobility Issues for Remote Workers

As companies continue to hire top talent, they also realize the need to allow top talent to work from remote or home office locations. Supporting remote workers is huge challenge that IT organizations are trying to figure out. Many remote workers have individual preferences setup, are not always logged onto the corporate network, or have special security and firewall configurations which make remote support difficult.

What is an IT organization to do to effectively resolve IT issues for remote workers?

Some companies have their remote workers FedEx computers back to the home office. Not only is this expensive but it creates lost productivity hours for the remote workers and potentially missed deadlines. Other companies try to resolve issues over the phone but not all remote workers are tech saavy enough to follow technical instructions over the phone. This method is not only time consuming and inefficient but creates much frustration for both parties.

Solution...

Leverage remote support technologies that are easy to use, cost effective and firewall friendly where the requirement is simply a browser and an internet connection. No dependencies on VPN connections, on the network or not, special setups. WebEx Remote Support, Remote Access or Systems Management all are excellent solutions.

In a recent study by IDC, they forecast that the mobile worker population in the U.S. will reach 113.5 million by 2008, up from 98.5 million only three years ago. Worldwide, it's expected to be closer to 878 million mobile and remote workers by the end of the decade!

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

International Opportunities for Web Conferencing

The web conferencing market continues to grow at an accelerated rate. According to Frost & Sullivan, the web conferencing market, which was valued at $725M in 2005, is forecasted to reach almost $3B in 2011, a compound annual growth rate of about 25.9%. (Data Source: Frost & Sullivan) Much of the global market capture will be from Small and Mid-sized Businesses and the international markets.

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Competition in the US is becoming more and more competitive and pervasive in every sales opportunity. Web conferencing companies need to focus on product differentiation, verticalized solutions, integrated applications, and an aggressive international strategy coupled with a first-to-market mentality will be key success factors for long-term success.

Web conferencing in China is beginning to emerge as an enabling technology and the web conferencing growth potential is enormous. China represents less than 5% of the World’s Total Web Conferencing Revenue while the USA accounts for about 82%, slightly down from the year before. It is evident that the international marketplace presents both opportunities and challenges for web conferencing companies.

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Thanks, David Chao The Web Conferencing Expert

Web Conferencing Market

According to Frost & Sullivan, the web conferencing market is currently valued at $725.4 million and projected to reach $2.9 billion in the next 5 years, which equates to a market growth rate of 24.4%!  Even more shocking is that the web conferencing technology penetration rate is less than 5%!

Frost & Sullivan also states that the web conferencing companies that are focused on integrating their technologies with Instant Messaging, VoIP, and video conferencing will benefit the most from the explosive growth over the next 5 years. WebEx already has WebEx AIM Pro Business Edition for enterprise instant messaging, built-in VoIP and video built on the H.264 video codec. Add in WebEx Connect and you have a recipe for long-term success.

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

The Importance of Integration

I believe that one of the strategic IT objectives of all companies is to increase utilization and efficiency of existing infrastructure investments. Most companies have a hodgepodge of systems that each perform a unique set of functions. Sometimes these systems are designed to serve only the needs of either one region, one office, or one department. The problems that arises is a siloed IT infrastructure where multiple systems cannot work together. There is no standardization. There is no commonality that interconnects these disparate systems so they can act as one. This is where integration comes into play.

Imagine if you could better leverage your existing IT infrastructure. Imagine if you could log into one single access point and have the ability to utilize all systems or databases. No longer would you have to log onto one system to perform one task only to have to log onto another system to run a report. This is the beauty of integration.

The companies that provide integration capabilities or open API's are the companies that will develop the strongest long-term strategic partnerships while increasing adoption across the technology ecosystem.

When you take a close look at the Software as a Service market, companies like WebEx have a slew of partners with out of the box integration solutions, as well as, provides open API's for specific customization. The benefit is tremendous flexibility to pick and choose which of your existing systems you want to interconnect.

Increased asset utilization, greater productivity, reduced costs.

Partial List of WebEx Integration Partners:

• Mindjet: information mapping and brainstorming application
• Salesforce.com: CRM
• Viewcentral: event management
• Remedy: case ticket management for customer support or helpdesk
• AOL Instant Messenger: integrated enterprise instant messaging
• GeoLearning: learning management application (LMS)
• Learn.com: learning management application (LMS) 
• Xerox 
• SumTotal: Docent and Click2Learn merger, performance and learning management
• Plateau Systems: learning management

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

The Impact of Web Conferencing for Small Businesses

Wainhouse Research recently released a new study on web conferencing and its impact on small businesses. Wainhouse Research had over 1,500 survey participants, of which 75% worked at companies with less than 500 employees. A majority of the small businesses leverage web conferencing as a competitive advantage to drive revenue, penetrate markets, and expand territory reach with minimal resources. Most even stated that web conferencing has become such a vital part of day to day business that they could not conduct business without it.

"Considering that SMBs constitute about 99.7% of U.S. businesses, comprise approximately 44% of the overall U.S. private payroll, and are responsible for more job creation than any other sector of the marketplace, Web conferencing is proving to be a strategic business tool," reported Alan Greenberg, senior analyst and partner at Wainhouse Research. "Next-generation Web conferencing solutions give SMBs the capability to impact local and global economies as never before possible."

Survey Highlights:

• "Outbound" Web conferencing applications that involve customers and prospects are most important to SMBs.
• 75% of SMB respondents believe the ability to involve/reach more people and save travel costs and time are major reasons to use Web conferencing; 59% say it makes meetings more productive.
• 55% of SMBs (and 44% of large enterprise respondents) say that in addition to the more predictable improvements in business practices, Web conferencing enables users to solve problems they could not solve before.
• 69% of all respondents use Web conferencing to enable new meetings that could not be held in any other way due to cost constraints, timing and several other issues.

"The majority of companies polled indicated they are increasing their use of Web conferencing, and are enjoying a high to very high return in value," said Greenberg. "Though companies of all sizes use Web conferencing to drive business processes, SMBs are much more aggressive in using online presentations and demonstrations to drive marketing and close sales by facilitating meetings with customers and prospects."

It is evident that even the smallest of small businesses need web conferencing.  Companies like WebEx, have designed programs specifically for small businesses: cost effective and flexible price models to match the needs of any small business. Without web conferencing, and reviewing these results, any small business that does not have a reliable, secure, and easy to use web conferencing solution will not reach cash flow positive status any time soon.

To view other similar research reports by Wainhouse Research, click here.

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Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert