Nasdaq-listed WebEx is the market leader in Web conferencing, a market Microsoft bought into by acquiring the number two player, PlaceWare, in 2003. The latter’s technology became Live Meeting and has been rolled into Microsoft’s Real Time Collaboration suite of offerings.
RTC is gaining muscle this year with the addition of VoIP and IM capabilities within Live Communications Server, moving it ever more squarely into competition with WebEx’s core competencies, albeit the latter are delivered as subscription-based services.
Now WebEx has counterattacked with the acquisition of Intranets, which hails from Burlington, Massachusetts. Where WebEx enables online, real-time collaboration, i.e. the synchronous variety, Intranets is all about asynchronous collaboration, again delivered as a service (the software is in fact hosted at a collocation site).
As such, it competes for the same corporate dollars that might otherwise be spent on enterprise software packages such as Microsoft’s SharePoint and the eRooms offering from EMC Corp’s Documentum business.
The difference is that the competitors are enterprise software for use within a company, with licensing and supporting hardware implications, said Praful Shah, VP of strategic communications at Santa Clara, California-based WebEx.
By comparison, he went on, a five-user license for Intranets costs $60 a month, or $12 each, which drops to $400 a month for 50 users, or $8 each. In addition, it’s difficult to enable the enterprise software packages’ use to include people outside a company’s network, he argued, whereas Intranets naturally lends itself to such use.
Intranets is targeted primarily at the SME space which is also Microsoft’s traditional stomping ground, and it boasts 300,000 subscribers in 12,000 companies around the world, with versions in English, German and Japanese. It used to offer a Web meeting service on its website, provided by a third party (Netspoke Conferencing) which has already been replaced by WebEx, said Shah.
The next step will be to migrate the Intranets service, currently delivered over the public internet, to the proprietary MediaTone network over which WebEx delivers its conferencing services. WebEx envisages maintaining Intranets as a standalone subsidiary to continue serving the market it has already developed, but there will also be integration of its technology into WebEx offerings, Shah went on.
We offer services such as Training Center, Support Center and Event Center, and we see potential for adding asynchronous applications into them, he began. Training Center could have a forum for discussion among the students, or a place where they could post different versions of a group project, for instance.
