Wednesday was a busy day on the wires for companies talking up their web conferencing solutions. But it was almost entirely devoted to collaborative team meetings rather than event software for large scale webinars. I'm seeing this more and more. So far there is nothing happening to make me change my prediction that we are heading towards collaborative meeting software as a free commodity service, with only a few companies left to duke out a revenue stream from the web events market.
That's one of the reasons I don't attempt to give exhaustive coverage and attention to collaborative conferencing. To be brutally frank, the other reason is that I don't get any business from services related to collaborative sessions. Nobody wants to pay a service provider to tell them how to improve a 5-person team meeting hosted for free. If you want a great recap of collaborative and peer-to-peer solutions, check out Robin Good's Kolabora website or news feed. He is constantly finding new products, often available for free.
As I look over Wednesday's press releases posted on my Webinar Success Industry News page, I see the following:
Premiere Global gets a spot in Gartner's latest Magic Quadrant for Web Conferencing. Well, yes... They should. PGi (as the abbreviation is strangely used) offers quite a few different web conferencing solutions from a variety of vendors. And one of the criteria for inclusion in the Quadrant this year was web conferencing revenues greater than $10 million annually, which shuts out a lot of the smaller vendors. But at least Premiere Global offers webinar-suitable products, so that is the exception to my introductory paragraph.
OpSource announced a customer win for their OpSource On-Demand product in support of a new product by Hyperwave called Appswave Conferencing. Appswave is billed in the press release as enabling teams to hold online meetings at any time without the need for extensive planning and set up.
In other hyper-news, HyperOffice announced HyperMeeting, "an easy-to-use web conferencing tool for small and mid-sized businesses." Welcome to the jungle, guys!
Cisco WebEx decided that they needed to get in on the action with a low price promotion for their collaboration product, WebEx Meeting Center. They are bundling the conferencing software for up to 25 attendees with toll teleconferencing and VoIP. The package is $69/month, or $59/month if you pre-purchase a year's commitment. That puts it a little higher than the list price of Citrix's GoToMeeting solution.
And speak of the devil... Citrix also managed to get in the news with a limited promotion for users in Denver and Minneapolis-St. Paul during their respective hosting dates for the Democratic and Republican conventions. Area residents can use GoToMeeting (and GoToMyPC) for 45 days for free during the conventions. Although this isn't that much more than an extended free trial offer, I get a kick out of watching these kinds of press releases tied in with current events. I've seen them offered in conjunction with bad weather, natural disasters, and public transportation snarls.
Of course the massive enterprise webinar vendors aren't ignoring the small collaborative market either. Adobe makes a small meeting product called ConnectNow available for free (up to 3 participants). WebEx has MeetMeNow as an even smaller collaboration solution than the aforementioned Meeting Center. And Microsoft has a "Standard" edition of Live Meeting that allows groups of 5-15 people to meet at a low price. iLinc is also in the mix with a collaborative product called MeetingLinc, but they don't post a list price on their site for monthly hosted usage like their competitors.
Meanwhile DimDim continues to get a lot of press as an open source solution for collaborative conferences (free up to 20 participants). I just recently saw a private demo of an online training product called eLearningZoom that was my first exposure to a private labeled solution built on top of DimDim as the technology platform.
It's all just overwhelming and there is a heck of a shakeout yet to come in this corner of the conferencing world. I'm going back to web events software, where there are fewer players and a little more structure. Phew!
