I just heard such a juicy piece of gossip that I simply must share it with you. Mind you, this is all unsubstantiated rumors and I claim no inside knowledge of any undisclosed business dealings whatsoever. But come along with me on a flight of fancy if you will...
My unnamed source says that the recent Cisco acquisition of WebEx came as an eleventh-hour shock to IBM, which had gone through a complete due-diligence process on WebEx and was already drafting press releases about their purchase of the company. Suddenly, whammo... Cisco pulled the rug out from under them.
If that's true, then we can suppose that IBM would still be hungry for an established web conferencing technology they could take over. Of course IBM already has Lotus web conferencing (aka: Sametime), but it's never made a big splash in the general business/consumer market. For one thing, it is designed for on-premise deployment, rather than hosted use ina SaaS (Software as a Service) mode. Companies that use a Lotus platform for instant messaging have the software for internal communications, but I have to say that I have never been invited to a Lotus web conference as an external participant. Ever. And in my former life as a product marketer and product manager for high tech software I participated in a lot of web conferences with a lot of companies. Including IBM.
This started me thinking about who's left as an independent player in the web conferencing space. I did a quick rumination on the subject back when Cisco first announced the WebEx buyout. I could only come up with iLinc, ON24, and Citrix Online as viable candidates. Citrix seems unlikely, as it is such a huge and well capitalized company and buying one business division and itsproducts from them would be a major hassle. ON24 has a good base of webcasting services and products, but it seems to me that the most attractive target would be iLinc. Its stock is incredibly cheap right now, trading in the neighborhood of 64 cents per share. Early investors there watched the stock drop from near $9 to less than $2 in the first year alone and it's never recovered. I would imagine there are people who would be delightedto get a buyout boost on their stock and would quickly approve such a deal.
iLinc also has a product model that is similar to WebEx's successful separation of web conferencing product versions for interactive group meetings, one-to-many presentations, training applications, and support applications.
But before any of my readers go running off to buy iLinc stock in anticipation of an imminent run-up, I should also point out that the company is unlike WebEx in many significant ways. It doesn't have the massive market share and public awareness that WebEx had built up through years of big marketing expenditures. It doesn't have the associated collaborative products and partnerships that WebEx had developed to incorporate instant messaging, shared workspaces, and office applications. And it hasn't created atechnical platform analogous to WebEx Connect for integrating third party SaaS "mashups."
So the question is, would IBM be interested in supplementing or replacing its pure-play web conferencing solution with another one more targeted at the general (non IBM enterprise) business market? Or was WebEx a unique opportunity because of the associated benefits it had beyond the web conferencing technology alone?
I'm looking forward to seeing the new 9.0 release of iLinc's web conferencing software this summer. I wonder if anyone else out there is looking forward to it for other reasons?
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Technorati Tags: Cisco, collaboration, IBM, iLinc, Sametime, web collaboration, web conference, web conferencing, webcasting, WebEx, webinar
