IP Conferencing and Collaboration has taken ground as an important tool for business communications. Recognizing the advanced benefits of collaborating with remote and distant workforces, web-based collaboration services are adding a completely new value-added service for enterprises of any size.

 

Globalization and a shift in the workplace to include employees and partners located across the world have made web-based collaboration tools essential to productivity and survival. In addition, with the rising costs and risks of air travel, more and more corporations want to offer virtual meetings that in many cases save significant dollars and fund the investment in web collaboration, outright.

 

A recent report by research firm Frost and Sullivan found that by 2010, the web-based collaboration services market will reach revenues of $2,644.5 million, up from $682.7 million in 2005 and with Web conferencing being a key driver of these revenues.

 

The report, "Pushing the Boundaries of Online Collaboration- Web-based Collaboration Service Market" found that both SMBs and big companies alike are able to find benefit in these tools.

 

Using web-based collaboration tools gives SMBs the ability to collaborate without having to spend lots on services or infrastructures to do so, and for larger companies, their able to expand their reach across the entire company in a cost effective, efficient and safe manner while also taking burden away from IT departments.

 

Frost and Sullivan Senior Industry Analyst Dominic Dodd in a statement to the press, "Web-based collaboration service providers are well-placed to use Web 2.0 technologies such as mash-ups to rapidly develop and deploy new services to meet changing market needs."

 

"Web-based collaboration services integrate tried and tested forms of collaboration such as Web conferencing and instant messaging with newer technologies such as desktops, workspaces, wikis and podcasts," Dodd also noted.

 

When it comes to the reality of enterprise-wide deployment, Cambridge-based Interwise has found a hot spot in the market with medium-to-large enterprises that want to leverage their existing network and application investments in conjunction with hosted capabilities, for the cost savings, management and security. Two years ago, Interwise integrated Web and TDM conferencing and made it possible for enterprises to deploy collaboration to every employee to use, for a fixed price.

 

As customers caught on to the fact they could save enormous amounts of money by switching from plain hosted and TDM conferencing, to premise-based integrated capabilities, Interwise saw the importance of giving them an architecture that would allow the benefits of both premise and hosted worlds to be tapped simultaneously.

“We put our efforts into delivering an application that is designed to perform efficiently on corporate bandwidth, but can switch over to hosted capacity wherever and whenever it is needed,”  Neil Lieberman, vice president for Interwise told TMCnet.

 

“Users don’t have to do a thing—the capacity is just there for them, at a fixed price. When they get Web meetings married with regular telephone access, the viral appeal of the technology takes off. As for the IT folks, knowing they won’t see a cost punishment because the application is successful and that their network won’t require a huge bandwidth increase, they are much happier and can get truly behind the idea of pushing for higher levels of communications and collaboration.”

 

There is a growing need for companies to have tools such as shared workspaces that allow them to collaborate online to author documents and complete tasks. Putting these tools on the desktop for all employees across the enterprise makes their importance even greater.

 

PNM Resources, a southwest multi-utility holding company, recently completed a hybrid premise/hosted deployment of Interwise Connect to its 3,400 employees in 60 locations. “Interwise’ fixed price/unlimited use pricing model offered us simplicity, the best economic value and the ability to give conferencing to every employee, enterprise-wide,” said Marc Christensen, corporate communications director for PNM Resources. “In our first weeks of usage, we saved almost $50,000 in travel expenses on one project alone.”