WebEx

WebEx is the largest hosted web conferencing vendor on the market today. With its slick user interface and convenient pay as you go model, it has gained a large corporate customer base.

However, the solution is not for everyone. One major caveat with WebEx is the pricing. It charges per concurrent seat on a subscription basis. So if you have a requirement for 100 participants, you will have to buy 100 concurrent licenses. In addition, you need to use traditional telephones and pay a toll call fee per minute, per seat. Needless to say, this can get quite pricey for any large enterprise with hundreds or thousands of staff across the organization.

WebEx is a hosted service which means you cannot bring the application in house and run it on your own servers and infrastructure. For some organizations, this is fine for those who don't want to manage their own solution, don't foresee the benefits of communications in large numbers across the organization, and don't want to integrate the solution with their backend systems systems such as LDAP, ERP, LMS, or even their phone system.

A couple of areas that also need attention is the scalability and VoIP engine. WebEx users need to use telephones for audio. WebEx does offer low quality VoIP, but in most cases is not usable in medium to large groups.

Do you use WebEx? Are you happy with the solution?

Web Conferencing AND Telephony Integration?

Multimedia Conferencing (Web Conferencing) is one of today's fastest growing corporate communications applications with real, quantifiable returns. The first generation of solutions provided a data collaboration solution to share files (i.e. PowerPoint) while relying on a separate voice bridge over the traditional phone network.

Many organizations still have disparate solutions for audio/video and data services which reduces increasing the support costs and time of setting up events. Moreover, disparate communication solutions cost the organization more to maintain and support.

Computers AND Telephones
Today, we can combine data collaboration with both quality VoIP AND traditional (PSTN) telephone in the same event. This not only provides maximum convenience for participants to select their available medium to join an event, but also reduces overall conferencing, IT , and telecom costs.

Here is a three step review to determine if you should consider web conferencing for its telephony integration or simply add telephony integration to your existing Interwise installation.

Step 1: Find out what conferencing solutions you have, how much it costs, and what you are using it for. Do you have separate solutions for audio and data conferencing? Conferencing costs are hidden in many places in most organizations. Don't just look at contracts, look at actual bills (IDD, ISDN), especially for per-minute based services. Actual charges are often much higher than planned budgets.

Step 2: Learn what your existing network can support today. One key aspect of cost-savings is to bring the conferencing platform in-house, rather than pay service providers on an monthly/annual basis. Check your PBX (number of ports, SIP enabled), network/bandwidth, and people-related requirements. Then sit down with your network team to determine what they can support today and what the incremental costs would be to bring a enterprise conferencing solution in-house.

The most advanced products offer two things that can dramatically ease an in-house solution. One is the ability to break the platform up into multiple pieces and move from a hosted service to an on-site deployment in stages. The other is the ability to integrate existing telephones into the solution so that you are not required to buy expensive, specialized IP telephones any faster than makes economic sense for your company.

Step 3: Look for opportunities to communication-enable core business processes. While immediate cost-saving is what you are looking for, many analysts believe that even greater economic benefit from these technologies lies in their ability to make key business processes more effective. Being able to integrate real time collaboration into these activities can make a significant impact on your bottom line, whether the critical success factors of your business are getting new products to market faster, improving the effectiveness of your direct sales team and channel partners, increasing customer retention through improved services, or coordinating information quickly between different parts of your organization. If so, this will help you refine the priorities that emerged from the first two steps about which areas of the company to focus on first in deploying any conferencing/collaboration solution.