The Web Conferencing Blog

Live Meeting Lay-Off

Word on the street is that Microsoft laid-off the last group of Live Meeting sales reps earlier this week. Though I have not seen a formal press release come across the newswire, a few individuals that I am close to from the Live Meeting team have confirmed this to be true. More on Live Meeting

Apparently 50 sales reps were laid off, all of them coming from the Mountain View, CA office. 5 of the 50 sales reps that were considered "top performers" were offered a relocation option to move to Redmond, WA and maintain their employment with Microsoft as part of the customer service and upsell team. All managers were let go and some sort of severence package was offered.

With a sales team that was not generating enough revenue to validate its existence, the only other option for Microsoft is to try to sell Live Meeting strictly over the web or through their channels. They have tried this in the past with little success so we will just have to wait and see what will happen this go around. They continue to lose market share even after spending hundreds of millions of marketing dollars year after year on a product they cannot effectively sell. Lots of money going out, very little coming back in. They have not figured out the formula for success and the product just does not deliver what they say it can. When Microsoft's Annual Report does not clearly state the Live Meeting revenue contribution and makes no mention of customer retention or market share figures, it is clear that the numbers are not something Microsoft is proud of. More on Live Meeting

Yesterday, a colleague of mine spoke with a Wall Street analyst friend of his and their conversation took an interesting turn when the Live Meeting lay-off topic came up. (His firm is a shareholder of WebEx stock.) He was shocked to hear of the lay-off but commented:

"This is huge! This can only mean good things for WebEx. The perception of WebEx has always been that it would only be a matter of time before you guys got swallowed up by Microsoft. We were betting that you guys would weather the storm and come out on top because of your superior suite of products. It took 2 years but looks like we were right."

The conversation led to "What will they do? How will they sell Live Meeting? Will they just scrap the product as a whole? Are they more focused on fending off Google and keeping their eye on the bulk of their revenue: Windows and Office?" All very good questions that remain unanswered today.

Nollenberger Equity Research Report March 6, 2006

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Thanks,

David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

Collaboration Prediction for 2006

Recently, I was at a technology symposium that focused on new emerging technologies and business process strategies. It soon became apparent to me that everything really revolved around helping companies become more productive, more agile, and more responsive to customer needs and market changes. It was all about "Convergent Collaboration."

Many of my customers have been talking about "convergence," specifically the convergence of audio, VoIP, video, real-time collaboration technologies (like WebEx) along with email and instant messaging. Traditionally, companies only have part of the capabilities and each from a different vendor. The problem is that there is no integration and no enterprise standard! A typical company has multiple audio providers to manage, maybe an antiquated video conferencing solution that is collecting dust, Yahoo IM, AOL, MSN, Jabber, Trillian for instant messaging, Cisco IP phones or something from Avaya for VoIP. It is all over the map, no common denominator.

By bundling these independent convergent capabilities into a single platform, the time savings, productivity and efficiency gains are tremendous. Imagine being able to host a real-time web meeting with a handful or remote individuals and then store the discussed documents into a central data repository located in your virtual "WebOffice." If someone has questions on one of the documents, they can jump on an integrated instant messaging solution to chat, place a VoIP-based video call, or initiate another web meeting. It's that simple since all the moving parts work together as one.

My prediction is that more and more businesses will enable their employees with an integrated communications solution that encompasses web collaboration, instant messaging, VoIP, video, web-based document sharing, and audio capabilities. Convergence of these capabilities helps extend value across the entire value chain and across the existing infrastructure while creating a corporate communications standard. The results... huge cost savings and measurable organizational productivity gains.

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert