As enterprises grow and partners and employees become more dispersed and mobile,
maintaining communication and collaboration becomes increasingly important—and
difficult. Meanwhile, travel and off-site meetings are falling victim to cost
cutting. In this landscape, remote conferencing tools break down geographic
barriers and allow companies to more easily and inexpensively connect with partners,
vendors, service providers, customers, and employees. Audio conferencing is
widely used today, but more and more businesses are discovering the additional
advantages offered by Web-conferencing solutions.
Although the Web-conferencing market is still young, recent acquisitions by Cisco Systems (of WebEx Communications) and Adobe
Systems (of Macromedia Breeze) indicate that it's already beginning
to consolidate. But a dizzying array of deployment and pricing models,
integrated services, and collaboration features continue to make it difficult for businesses to settle on a viable long-term solution.
Service or Software?
Web-conferencing solutions are available either as a hosted service (i.e., Software
as a Service—SaaS) or as a purchased technology that you install in-house.
To decide between the two and achieve the best ROI, organizations need to consider
the number of employees who will use the solution, the number of concurrent
seat licenses needed, and how much time is spent in conferences.
With SaaS, up-front expenses are nonexistent or minimal, there is no charge
for upgrades or new features, and companies aren't locked into a particular
software. SaaS solutions typically charge either a per-user, per-minute fee
or a flat-rate, unlimited-use fee for a specified amount of time. Small-to-midsized
businesses with low usage levels and companies that are evaluating conferencing
solutions are likely better off with a hosted service.
Purchasing Web-conferencing technology and equipment is usually
the way to go for companies that have high usage levels. Up-front costs
are significant, but over time, companies avoid the spiraling usage costs
of SaaS. In-house solutions offer more control over application performance, availability, and—because the application is installed inside the
organization's firewall—security. Further, organizations that want to
integrate their conferencing solution with crucial business applications,
such as customer relationship management, ERP, information management, and project management, will find that managing the integration
is easier if they have an in-house solution. Although recent Gartner
research shows that 70 percent to 80 percent of Web conferences use
SaaS, Gartner expects that percentage to drop in favor of more on-site
solutions because of cost, reliability, and security concerns.
Quite a few vendors make their Web-conferencing solutions available both as
a hosted service and as standalone software, letting companies choose the model
that best suits their needs. Microsoft, for one, will offer a hosted model for
its Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007 (which is due to ship this fall) as well
as a standalone solution, which will be marketed as Microsoft Office Communications
Server 2007. Cisco's WebEx Meeting Center and Adobe Acrobat Connect (formerly
Macromedia Breeze Meeting Center) are also available in both forms. And Interwise
offers not only hosted-service and standalone versions of its Interwise Connect
product, but also a hybrid solution that lets you seamlessly fail over to the
host-based version should your in-house application fail, and vice versa.
Some Web-conferencing providers offer a
pay-as-you-go option. This no-subscription,
no-seat-license, no-minimum-usage-fee plan
is an attractive alternative for small businesses
or organizations that conduct few online meetings. Examples include the Meeting On Now
service, which lets you reserve a "meeting
room" for $12.50 per day, and Unlimited Conferencing, which offers a pay-as-you-go service for 14.9 cents per minute per participant.
Virtually Speaking
Most organizations begin looking at Web conferencing when their needs expand
beyond the capabilities of their voice-conferencing system. Companies that simply
want to add Web conferencing functionality to their telephone conferencing system
can contract with a service provider to add the Web component to their existing
audio conferencing solution. Another option is to connect a purchased in-house
Webconferencing application to the corporate phone system, which adds voice
capabilities. Sonexis ConferenceManager offers a twist on this model:
an audio-conferencing bridge with built-in plug and-play Web-conferencing capabilities.
Increasingly, solution providers are integrating audio with Web conferencing,
giving users a choice of audio-only conferencing or integrated audio and Web
conferencing. For example, Citrix Online's Citrix GoToMeeting includes
a conference call service, which provides a phone number that meeting participants
can dial to join the conference. Participants are charged their standard long-distance
rate for the call.
VoIP is also becoming more widespread in conferencing solutions. In addition
to its low cost, VoIP lets participants listen over a phone or directly through
their computer, depending on the service and equipment used. Solutions that
provide audio conferencing via both VoIP and telephone allow users who don't
have Internet access to participate in meetings, even though they can't see
any online content. (They could, however, work with an offline Microsoft PowerPoint
presentation.) Adobe Acrobat Connect, Live Meeting 2007, Elluminate
Live!, eBLVD Online Meetings, Interwise Connect, and WebEx Meeting Center
all offer both traditional voice communication and VoIP. Such solutions let
users switch from telephone to VoIP at any time. For example, attendees who
join a meeting while away from the office can switch to another phone or VoIP
when they return to their desk. Unless your bandwidth or equipment won't support
it, you should consider a conferencing tool that provides VoIP functionality.
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