Conferencing Freeware Expands Market, but With Limits

Jul 14, 2005 8:00 AM

Videoconferencing on demand, anytime, anywhere. It’s a goal businesspeople have pursued in a variety of ways, from high-end, dedicated collaboration systems to the conferencing freeware proliferating on the Internet. Today, these choices are, if anything, more diverse than ever, and potential users need to think clearly about their specific needs.

The combination of Internet telephony and ever-cheaper webcams means just about anyone can make an IP-based video call these days. One of the pioneer applications in this area was CU-SeeMe, a free videoconferencing tool developed in the early 1990s at Cornell University, which could be downloaded free from a number of websites.

The basic tool lacked such features as a whiteboard, though, and a variety of other developers piled into the market. Involving multiple participants, sharing files, and collaborating in realtime required higher levels of capability. These expanded capabilities are now becoming more available in more forms.

The Swedish firm Marratech, for example, has recently introduced Marratech-Free, which it says “lets people meet up with friends or colleagues through realtime video with high-quality voice plus an interactive whiteboard. Up to five people can meet, talk, see each other, make notes, and share documents or pictures. It runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and it's all free.”

Company CEO Lars Persson says, "For the first time, realtime collaboration is available to everyone.”

Freeware downloaded from the Internet may have its place in the expanding video collaboration universe, but that place is limited, says David Martin, co-CEO of Smart Technologies. “Most free software is not created toward interoperability and telecom standards,” he says. Instead, he explains, freeware is oriented to users who obtain the same software and other tools and talk one-on-one.

“The group room videoconferencing systems, like Polycom and Tandberg, generally have built their business on creating products that interoperate with each other according to international standards,” Martin adds. “Desktop systems that connect to other desktop systems satisfy one need. Group systems that connect to other group systems satisfy another. The third category is the need to build standards-based products that allow a desktop user to connect with people that have a group room system.”

Much of this connectivity may involve places outside traditional offices. Tandberg’s just-announced purchase of Ivigo, a division of TNO, the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research and a provider of interactive multimedia video applications and developer of video services for 3G mobile phones, is an example.

Andrew Miller, Tandberg CEO, says the new system is “truly anywhere-and-anyone video.” He adds, “Coupled with our Expressway firewall-traversal technology, this complete system will allow 3G mobile callers to reach their IP-based home office or remote-office video unit without being stopped by a firewall.”

Corporate firewalls, in fact, have been an impediment to anytime/anywhere conferencing. Martin notes that Microsoft’s NetMeeting, which used to come bundled with Windows, “was adopted fairly widely for internal meetings and followed some of the standard protocols. It should be pointed out that NetMeeting did not support meetings through the firewall, and this meant that it didn’t get as much traction as a product being used between corporate users in different enterprises.”

Now, Martin adds, “Microsoft has removed NetMeeting from recent releases of their operating system and seems to be focused on promoting their Live Meeting service.”

Live Meeting is being branded by Microsoft as part of the Microsoft Office System. The company says it “allows customers to share their desktops or specific applications for improved collaboration. Live Meeting is designed to make online conferencing easy and affordable.”

Says Martin, “It will be interesting to see how this plays out.”