The Webinar Blog

The Axe Blade Approaches Citrix Online

Back in April I speculated on a rumor that Citrix was considering selling or spinning off its online services unit including the GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, and GoToTraining conferencing products.

This week Citrix announced that CEO Mark Templeton would retire. In a Facebook post he said "It remains business as usual at Citrix and there will be no impact in how you do business with us." But then he said "We have announced the exploration of strategic alternatives for our GoTo family of products as well as active discussions regarding a potential sale of our ByteMobile business."

That mirrors this formal statement from the July 28 Second Quarter Financial Results report:

Commences Exploration of Strategic Alternatives for GoTo Family of Products

In addition, Citrix, with the assistance of its independent advisors, has initiated a review of strategic alternatives for the company’s GoTo family of products. The strategic alternatives review for this business could result in, among other things, a possible sale or spin-off transaction.

Qatalyst Partners and Goldman, Sachs & Co. are serving as financial advisors to Citrix and Goodwin Procter LLP is serving as legal counsel.

All of this action follows a public letter last month from Elliott Management Corporation. They bought up enough Citrix stock to trigger a formally mandated 13D SEC filing and wasted no time in flexing their muscles as significant shareholders. It was not pleasant, highlighting analysis such as:

“The Company’s execution has been terribly poor for more than 2 years, and we believe management will be compelled to make more organizational changes going forward – beyond those already announced.”

Elliott made it clear that the online division and conferencing products needed to go:

"While we recognize the broad notion of empowering a mobile workforce, this business’s go-to-market strategy, product development roadmap and end-market are absolutely distinct from the core of Citrix. GoTo is an attractive business with scale in its market, and we have confidence that it can realize significant value through several alternative transaction structures, including a sale or a spin. We also further believe that core Citrix’s management can create significantly more value for stockholders by focusing on operational execution rather than attempting to oversee the GoTo franchise."

In re-reading my previous article about what could happen to Citrix Online (and I want to stress again that I have NO insider knowledge and no financial involvement in any way), I'm going to strengthen my guess… What would be best for customers and easiest to implement quickly? Spinoff of the unit into its own corporate entity. What do I think will happen? PGi will buy it.

Now we sit back and see how well my crystal ball works. I'm sure we won't have long to wait.

Technorati Tags: Citrix,Citrix Online,Elliott Management,GoToMeeting,GoToWebinar,GoToTraining,web conferencing,webcasting,webinar,web meetings,online meetings

Learn About Demand Gen Webinars

I hope you'll join me tomorrow (unless you are reading this on Tuesday, in which case I hope you'll join me today) for a tip-filled session regarding webinars intended for demand generation.

ON24 has invited me to be a keynote speaker for this installment in their ongoing Webinar Academy series of informative online trainings and discussions. My session is scheduled for 11am California / 2pm New York (click here for time conversions).

We'll start with the tricky question of just what the heck people mean when they say "Demand Generation" -- Is it the same as "Lead Generation?" Then I'll move on to pragmatic tips for building audiences, influencing their perceptions of you, and getting the response you want.

Register ahead of time at the ON24 landing page describing the session: http://j.mp/on24dgen

See you online!

Technorati Tags: ON24,demand generation,webcast,webcasting,webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,marketing

BigMarker Bets Big on WebRTC

BigMarker put out a press release today trumpeting their webinar platform as the first one based on WebRTC to allow a 1000 participant capacity. This deserves some reflection, as platform talk has been heating up recently.

It's easy to get down in the weeds very fast when talking about underlying technology platforms. This blog isn't the right forum to try to dig into coding and implementation details, so I won't even try. But it's useful to at least summarize the web conferencing technology situation at a high level for context.

For this particular discussion, I will make no distinction between "webinars," "webcasts," and "web conferences." Consider the terms interchangeable here (but not elsewhere!).

The first approach to web conferencing implementation uses "client applications." In order to take part in a webinar, presenters and attendees download a program, install it on their personal computer, and run it at show time. WebEx and GoToWebinar are two well-known examples of this methodology. The main disadvantages are a need to create versions for different operating systems, a need for users to update and reinstall the software (leading to potential version conflicts), and security concerns in some organizations that don't allow employees to download and install software on company workstations.

In an attempt to get around the download/install frustrations, some vendors went to "in-browser" web conferencing. In this scenario, the conferencing software is never installed on a user's hard drive. Standard web browsers give access to communications and display of materials. The software needs help from third-party technologies to make it work. These have progressed from Active/X and Java to the current favorite for many vendors: Adobe Flash. (It is also worth noting that many of these products still require presenters to load a local client application before starting screen sharing.)

It turns out that relying on those communication and display technologies opened up new frustrations. The big vendors supplying the underlying platforms (Sun, Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe) could change the way they worked at any time. Vendors would have to scramble to stay current and make sure their software worked with the latest version of Flash or Java, while hopefully still working with the older versions some users still had. Security has again emerged as a major headache, with some organizations not allowing their employees to run Flash applications in their browsers.

In fact, just this week we saw another high-profile news story following a tweet from the Chief Security Officer at Facebook:

Because Flash acts as a gateway between the web and the local device, it has proved vulnerable to security hacks, and Adobe keeps releasing new updates in reaction to discovered holes.

For many in the web conferencing community, the new beacons of hope are HTML5 and WebRTC. Each includes functionality specifically designed to facilitate real time communications through web browsers without additional third-party programs. But the technologies are still developing and are not supported on all browsers and devices. So we are definitely in a state of flux.

BigMarker's decision to put their eggs firmly in the WebRTC basket is a bold one. It limits the choices that users have in web browsers (Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari are currently not supported). Even users with the required Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox browsers could potentially face security barriers in their organization… I have seen some threads on the internet where people are concerned that WebRTC exposes their IP address and potentially other local data. They have developed add-ons to disable WebRTC in the browsers, which will kill BigMarker conferencing along with any other WebRTC applications.

I am quite interested in BigMarker's business model for their application. They are a relative latecomer to the web conferencing space, founded a mere five years ago. This gave them the opportunity to design for the new technologies without having to worry about legacy code. That could be a leg up on the competition, but it also means they are forced to cope with the inevitable restrictions and limitations that new technologies have. For instance, screen sharing still requires a separate applet to be installed in Chrome, and it is not supported in Firefox at all. Uploaded PowerPoints are converted to static images (and the company recommends converting your PowerPoint to a PDF document for best display in a webinar). So screen sharing is the way to go if you require animations or screen transition effects. Mobile device support is still in final testing mode and not yet available to the public.

But there is a lot to like. The software allows hosts to charge attendees for events if desired. Recordings are automatic and instantly available after a live event. A community of users allows webinar hosts to publicize their events using categories and keywords to help drive awareness and registration.

BigMarker is going to act as a great early indicator of strengths and weaknesses in the new HTML5 and WebRTC world of web conferencing. As such, it goes on my list as an important company to watch.

Technorati Tags: BigMarker,WebRTC,HTML5,web conference,web conferencing,webinar,webcast,webcasting,web seminar,online event,web event,Adobe Flash

Fotosearch Stock Photography Review

Megan at Fotosearch contacted me and asked if I would take a look at www.fotosearch.com to add it to my list of stock photography sites I have reviewed. I was not familiar with Fotosearch and agreed. Here are my impressions.

Fotosearch is a division of Publitek, which has been in business since 1987, making stock photographs available to publishers back before web access for the masses. The Fotosearch website was created in 1998 and acts as a consolidator for many different image publishers that Publitek had included in their catalogs. I counted 143 sites on their source publishers page, which is pretty darned impressive!

The site lets you narrow results to focus on photographs, illustrations, clip art, vector art, and video clips. Search options are very basic compared to some of the other high-priced single-source services. You can choose a specific source publisher and aspect ratio (eg: Vertical, Horizontal, or Square). There are no filters for image background color, transparencies, number of people, age, etc. So plan to spend time paging through long grids full of thumbnail photos. Fortunately the search results and page displays come up quickly.

I did my standard test case of using the very basic search terms of "businessman" and "businesswoman." As with most stock photography sites, results were overwhelmingly skewed towards Caucasian models. The males seemed to feature a bit more ethnic variety and a better age range. Women on stock photography sites continue to suffer from sexist depictions that overemphasize tight skirts and come-hither looks. But I was encouraged to see some female subjects who looked like real human beings rather than fashion models. Adding an ethnic search term such as "Black Businessman" or "Indian Businesswoman" was very successful at bringing up many choices, which I think is an advantage of sourcing from the many different provider services.

Is there a compelling reason to consider Fotosearch over its competitors? I think the primary advantage comes from one particular pricing option that is perfect for a single user preparing a PowerPoint presentation. You can purchase a one-week subscription that lets you download ten pictures a day for seven days. It only costs $39, giving you a cost effective way to grab all the photos you need for a graphic-intensive business presentation without worrying about using up additional credits or having unneeded subscription time sitting unused in your account when you are done.

Another nice sideline is that when I did some quick Googling on Publitek and Fotosearch for complaints from unpaid photographers, I came up empty. So the company seems to be reputable and fair enough to the people making their money from the pictures. That is not always the case. The basic longevity of the company is another comforting clue as to their professionalism.

How about downsides? As I mentioned, the lack of advanced search filters is a pity. Pricing for individual photos is on the high side, and I would definitely recommend a subscription as the best value. There is no link or phone number for help with technical problems… Just an FAQ page. I know this because I ran into a problem in my tests where I could no longer get any search results displayed when asking for "Stock Footage" (video clips). It didn't matter what keywords I used, the results came up empty. Closing my Chrome browser or logging out made no difference. But if I opened up Internet Explorer or Firefox, I got results as expected. I still don't know what the heck happened, as Chrome was showing results properly when I first tried it.

I plan to add Fotosearch.com to my set of resources for sourcing PowerPoint images on my own presentations. Having access to the one-week subscription is too good to pass up.

For links to my other stock photography reviews, check out the post that started it all: http://wsuccess.typepad.com/webinarblog/2012/03/stock-photography-sites.html

Technorati Tags: Fotosearch,fotosearch.com,stock photography,stock photographs,stock pictures,stock illustrations,stock images,presentation design