Kicking the NetMeeting Habit

Kicking the NetMeeting Habit Kicking the NetMeeting Habit W A Two-Step Program to Unleash the Full Potential of Web Conferencing A Two Step Program to Unleash the Full Potential Andy of Web Conferencing Nilssen & Alan Greenberg Wainhouse Research December 2005 Kicking the NetMeeting Habit A Two-Step Program to Unleash the Full Potential of Web Conferencing Andy Nilssen & Alan D. Greenberg Wainhouse Research January 2006 Contents Executive Summary .................................................................................................................................... 1 The Role of NetMeeting.............................................................................................................................. 2 Limitations & Their Impact on Productivity ........................................................................................... 3 For Internal Use Only ................................................................................................................................... 3 Limited Participation .................................................................................................................................... 4 Lack of integration........................................................................................................................................ 4 Other Limitations .......................................................................................................................................... 5 Two Simple Steps to Kicking the NetMeeting Habit ............................................................................... 6 Admitting There is a Problem....................................................................................................................... 6 Recognize the Symptoms of the Problem ..................................................................................................... 6 Creating a Recovery Plan.............................................................................................................................. 7 Unleashing the Potential: Life After NetMeeting..................................................................................... 9 Global Electronics Manufacturer: The Gradual Withdrawal Method......................................................... 10 Enterprise Print Management Solutions (EPMS): The “Cold Turkey” Approach...................................... 10 Large Equipment Manufacturer: Desperate Times, Desperate Measures................................................... 11 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................. 13 About the Authors..................................................................................................................................... 14 About Wainhouse Research ........................................................................................................................ 14 About WebEx.............................................................................................................................................. 14 Kicking the NetMeeting Habit Copyright © 2006 Wainhouse Research. All rights reserved. Executive Summary Introduced by Microsoft in 1996, NetMeeting grew to be and remains one of the world’s most popular web conferencing tools. Though its usage has declined, Wainhouse Research believes that NetMeeting still is in use by as many as 15 percent of web conferencing users. 1 This makes it the third most widely used web conferencing resource after WebEx and Microsoft Office Live Meeting. Yet IT organizations increasingly have restricted its use, and other platforms, most notably WebEx and Live Meeting, have gained greater currency in the enterprise. In many respects one could describe NetMeeting as a Generation 1 web conferencing product while platforms like WebEx and Live Meeting represent the evolution towards Generation 2 web collaboration solutions. NetMeeting’s major strengths – that it’s free (included as part of Windows), ubiquitous, and relatively easy to use – fueled its early growth, especially among rogue, habitual users. Commercial users, however, increasingly understand that its limitations have a concomitant impact on user productivity. It: • • • • • Cannot easily traverse firewalls - effectively limiting its use to internal meetings. Faces severe performance degradation when used for meetings larger than 8-10 participants. Lacks mechanisms for assessing its usage and measuring its impact on corporate networks. Does not provide conference recording or playback, necessary for compliance with new requirements for audit trails such as Sarbanes-Oxley. Is showing its age through the lack of APIs for integration with business workflow applications.. This white paper presents a simple two-step process to kicking the NetMeeting habit: 1. Admitting there is a problem by recognizing the symptoms. 2. Creating a recovery plan by finding new applications and implementing a new solution. The resulting impact can be profound. Detailed in this document are three companies that range in size but which each unleashed web conferencing by moving away from NetMeeting: 1. The global electronics manufacturer that is using a careful “change management approach,” cutting down on travel while increasing ASP usage by 20 percent annually. 2. The printing management software company that took a “cold turkey” approach and that says it has added $100,000 to the annual bottom line through use of WebEx. 3. The large equipment manufacturer that has increased its web collaboration usage to tens of millions of monthly minutes over two years, and radically decreased support tickets numbers. Microsoft no longer supports NetMeeting and intends to remove it from its upcoming Vista operating system. Wainhouse Research strongly recommends enterprises become proactive in replacing NetMeeting with an IT-manageable, next generation web collaboration platform – and reap additional productivity gains sooner rather than later. 1 “WebMetrics Q3 Survey,” November, 2005, Wainhouse Research 1 Copyright © 2006 Wainhouse Research, LLC The Role of NetMeeting Upon its introduction by Microsoft in 1996, NetMeeting clearly addressed a user need for a data conferencing tool and sparked initial adoption by anyone willing to click the icon and explore its capabilities. While it began as strictly a multipoint data conferencing tool, it evolved over the years by adding IP-based point-to-point audio early on and adding point-to-point videoconferencing later. Yet Microsoft never treated it as more than a minor capability in Windows. In late 2003 the company announced that NetMeeting had run its course: there would be no further enhancements, and Microsoft’s official support of the product would end shortly. NetMeeting was built on the ITU-T T.120 data conferencing standard to ensure its interoperability with other T.120 products and multipoint servers. The T.120 standard, however, has since become largely irrelevant. Unlike more expensive, hardware-intensive audio and video conferencing equipment, web conferencing and collaboration solutions are software-based, and thus investment protection and interoperability between vendors is a non-issue. While the need to conform to standards has limited the potential for the continued innovation of NetMeeting, the freedom from those standards has opened today’s solutions to seemingly unlimited innovation. What then accounts for NetMeeting’s continued popularity among rogue corporate users, even in the wake of newer, more innovative solutions? The phenomenon may be attributed in no small measure to the fact that NetMeeting has always been offered at no cost to users of Windows-based operating systems. Originally offered as a free download with Internet Explorer, it ultimately became part of Microsoft Windows 98 and subsequent versions of the Windows operating system. As a result, it has become a ubiquitous tool, readily available to anyone with a Windows-based PC. With its ready availability and ease of use, NetMeeting has become popular over the years as a “rogue” tool often used by groups within corporations without the knowledge or blessing of IT. Yet IT organizations are now trying to manage NetMeeting usage – at least on a policy level. Unfortunately this becomes a best effort attempt that ultimately fails because there is nothing particularly manageable about NetMeeting. The functionality of NetMeeting is as follows: • T.120 data conferencing, which enables users in multiple locations to communicate over the corporate intranet or perhaps (firewall-permitting) Internet, sharing information, applications, and files. Other supported standards include point-to-point H.323-compatible audio and video conferencing (audio and video become multipoint by using an external, network-based MCU). Figure 1 NetMeeting (Program Sharing) • Remote desktop sharing, which enables users to operate PCs from remote locations, and a multi-tiered security mechanism to protect user privacy. Use in conjunction with Microsoft ILS directory servers to locate people and initiate meetings with them. 2 • Kicking the NetMeeting Habit Limitations & Their Impact on Productivity NetMeeting’s major strengths – that it’s free, ubiquitous, and its basic feature set is relatively easy to use – are offset by a number of technical limitations that ultimately take their toll user productivity by either constraining who can be included or what can be accomplished during a meeting or, even worse, not even being considered as a viable option for many situations. Among the areas in which NetMeeting is limiting: For Internal Use Only Perhaps the most severe limitation of NetMeeting when compared to modern web collaboration offerings is its inability to operate beyond network address translation devices (NATs) and corporate firewalls. This makes it suitable for internal communications only – a major inconvenience, to put it mildly, in an era of growing networked collaboration across traditional organizational boundaries. Because NetMeeting is designed to conform to the dynamic port liabilities inherent to the T.120 and H.323 standards, organizations that use it for conferencing cannot include partners, vendors, customers, and others without opening and exposing a large number of ports in their firewalls. This effectively renders NetMeeting ineffective for any applications that involve external participants such as sales and marketing events, customer and partner training, and customer support. Figure 2 shows the top applications for web collaboration as rated by end users. Virtually all of the applications involve external participants; productivity would be severely impacted or the conference would not take place with an internal-only limitation. 70% 58% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 56% 53% 35% 31% 27% 21% ELe ar ni ng Pr es en ta t io ns Pr es en ta t io ns Tr ai De m on st ra Cl ie nt Figure 2 Top Web ConferencingApplications 2 2 “WebMetrics Q3 2005,” November 2005, Wainhouse Research Sa le s 3 Copyright © 2006 Wainhouse Research, LLC Re m ot e Sa le s Su pp or t ni ng Te am tio ns s By contrast, modern web collaboration solutions are unencumbered by standards and thus overcome this limitation by using proprietary technologies that are designed specifically to work through NATs and firewalls. The only viable alternative for NetMeeting users is to take the unlikely step of creating virtual private networks (VPNs) for partners. As shown in Figure 3, according to one survey 77% of all NetMeeting users also meet frequently with people who are not company employees. While some of these users may use web collaboration to meet, just as many are likely to lose productive time by traveling to an off-site, in-person meeting. Limited Participation Figure 3 How often do you meet with people who are not company employees? 3 Another significant shortcoming of NetMeeting is that no more than 8-12 users can participate in a meeting, due to the product’s reliance on a serverless, peer-to-peer architecture. Each peered device can only support so much traffic before it becomes overloaded. To avoid such problems, some companies even limit NetMeeting conferences to no more than five participants. Thus large meetings cannot use NetMeeting – exactly the situation that could exhibit a high productivity gain based on larger numbers of attendees. Lack of Integration NetMeeting is not designed to integrate easily with other applications. One cannot easily use NetMeeting with IM services, for example, or integrate it with public switched telephony network (PSTN)-based audio conferencing. Nor can it be easily integrated with many of the day-to-day enterprise applications knowledge workers now rely on, such as productivity, workflow, or document management applications. Initiating an ad-hoc web collaboration session from within a workflow application – signaling the need for additional information, to settle a discrepancy, or to add value to the situation at hand – greatly increases the speed of turnaround and resolves issues without creating an action item to track later. In short, application integration takes the potential of productivity gains through web collaboration to the next level. 3 “NetMeeting Usage Survey,” Private survey project, WebEx, December 2005 Kicking the NetMeeting Habit 4 45% 40% 42% 34% 34% 41% Today 36% 31% One Year 35% 31% 35% 30% 25% 25% 20% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0% Productivity Apps Workflow Apps Document Mgmt IM Systems Phone Systems Figure 4 Capabilities Most Desired for Integration into Web Conferencing 4 Other Limitations 1. No specialized applications such as events, sales process/CRM, or customer support systems; lack of integration with document management or asynchronous collaboration tools. 2. Lack of mechanisms for measuring usage and assessing impact on the network. Most organizations have no idea how much NetMeeting is being used; others restrict the use of video because of the potential network impact. 3. Lack of conference recording or playback for compliance with new requirements for audit trails such as those contained in the US Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. 4. Operation on Microsoft platforms only. While NetMeeting can communicate with other T.120capable platforms and software clients, no ongoing support is available from Microsoft to resolve interoperability issues. Impact on Productivity Using NetMeeting negatively affects user productivity because, to use an old saying, organizations are ”saving a dime in cost but losing a dollar in productivity.” The value of developing products more quickly, reaching partners more efficiently, and selling to prospects more effectively cannot be overstated. In recent years it has become the IT imperative to continuously find ways to improve worker productivity in order for the enterprise to find new ways of competing. Relying on an outmoded approach to 4 “WebMetrics Q3 Survey,” November, 2005, Wainhouse Research 5 Copyright © 2006 Wainhouse Research, LLC collaboration simply does not hold up to scrutiny when moderate investments in modern web collaboration solutions can have far greater payback. Some organizations try to augment NetMeeting by using additional web conferencing services that overcome these limitations and thus are more suited to other applications. But any advantages to be gained from such a move are likely to be undercut by the need to train users on multiple platforms and for IT to support multiple platforms. Replacing NetMeeting with a newer, more flexible web conferencing capability is really the only sensible alternative. Although NetMeeting still ships as part of the Windows XP operating system, Microsoft has not released a new version of this conferencing software since 2001. Microsoft has announced that NetMeeting will not ship with the upcoming Vista follow-on operating system to Windows XP, scheduled for late 2006. As a result, the inevitable migration away from NetMeeting to a second generation web collaboration platform should begin sooner rather than later to maximize potential productivity gains. Two Simple Steps to Kicking the NetMeeting Habit Admitting There is a Problem As with any long-term dependency, the first step toward doing something about it is to recognize that a problem exists. Though NetMeeting may seem a relatively benign solution for conferencing, it is in fact preventing many organizations from realizing the full potential of the productivity gains available to them through web conferencing. As the case studies later in this paper illustrate, companies that have kicked the NetMeeting habit and made the transition to today’s newer, more innovative web collaboration solutions have experienced tremendous increases in their use of conferencing and, by extension, in their organizational productivity. Using NetMeeting today is the conferencing equivalent of using a rotary phone instead of a touch-tone phone, or making recordings on cassette tapes instead of burning to CDs. One can get the basic functionality necessary to talk to another person. But lost entirely are the functional enhancements that most people cannot live without once they have made the switch. Furthermore, staying with a technology that’s clearly being supplanted by a more advanced approach is just delaying the inevitable – and not maximizing the productivity gains in the process. Because NetMeeting is being discontinued and change is inevitable, Wainhouse Research recommends that organizations start realizing potential gains sooner rather than later. Recognize the Symptoms of the Problem Enterprises can spot the problem by looking for symptoms which arise from the use of Generation 1 conferencing tools. Specific symptoms that point to the existence of a problem include: • Employees are starting to use WebEx, Live Meeting, or more exotic (and possibly less secure) web conferencing services without informing IT. Starting every web conferencing meeting takes 5-10 minutes. 6 • Kicking the NetMeeting Habit • Supplier communications are limited to email and voice calls, with actual meetings that require interaction and collaboration taking place only in-person. Employees begin to request VPN accounts specifically to collaborate with suppliers and customers. Productivity from and growth in web conferencing usage shows limited improvement over time. Users demand an ILS server for IP addresses that change and because they wish to more readily find one another. • • • Creating a Recovery Plan Making the transition from NetMeeting to a new and more productive solution requires careful planning. A sound recovery plan requires a full assessment of current conferencing within the organization, followed by an evaluation of potential alternatives and the selection and implementation of a solution. Assessment of current state. Assessing the current use of conferencing within an organization calls for not only identifying the ways in which NetMeeting is being used, but also identifying the ways in which it is not being used. This means seeking out untapped opportunities that could be exploited with a different approach to conferencing. This applications discovery calls for a combination of brainstorming and analysis to identify conferencing opportunities that are not possible with NetMeeting, but that could be used with a scaleable, flexible, robust solution to increase productivity. These might include: • Widespread, secure collaboration with partners, vendors, customers, and others outside the organization’s firewall Large-scale meetings and events that go far beyond the half-dozen or so participants in a NetMeeting conference Delivery of training content to large groups outside the organization via live or on-demand web casting Integration of conferencing with business processes such as sales workflow, learning management and customer support • • • Next, it is worthwhile to identify infrastructure components that cannot be integrated with NetMeeting, but that could be integrated with a new solution. These include, but are not necessarily limited to, Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes, directories and databases, Instant Messaging systems, and PSTN audio conferencing. Before beginning to evaluate potential solutions that will enable new opportunities, it may be necessary to evaluate the current costs and limited ROI of using NetMeeting. Though it comes bundled with an operating system at no additional charge, and there may therefore be no direct cost associated with acquiring it, ongoing IT support costs (minimal to moderate) and lost productivity (potentially very high) 7 Copyright © 2006 Wainhouse Research, LLC remain a factor. Quantifying these costs can help with making an informed decision about the value in acquiring and supporting an alternative. Once you have thoroughly explored the current state of usage, including potential opportunities, integration needs, and support and other costs, you can assemble a list of requirements for an alternative solution that addresses everything NetMeeting ever did – and more. Evaluation of alternatives. Once you’ve established that a particular solution will enable you to realize new applications opportunities not addressable by NetMeeting , the next step is to determine whether that solution will meet the organization’s needs at the right price and in the most productive way. Several basic criteria can be applied to evaluating different web collaboration solutions to determine how well they will serve you beyond fulfilling basic functional requirements. These criteria include the pricing model, method of deployment, level of incremental productivity, and level of vendor commitment to helping make the transition to the new solution. Because it “seems” to be free, for an organization that is moving away from NetMeeting, the smoothest transition will be to a web conferencing solution with a flat pricing model. NetMeeting users are accustomed to starting ad hoc data conferences without worrying about incremental costs. A flat pricing model will not only continue to encourage this behavior, but also catalyze the adoption of new applications without incurring a cost penalty. Flat pricing models have been introduced by the leading web collaboration vendors at costs that are very attractive. In fact, some companies are beginning to consider internal meetings as free – and avoid bill back charges to departments and business units – while absorbing the flat costs as overhead that covers their external meeting needs. The choice of method of deployment is essentially between an ASP deployment, which relies on a service provider to operate and manage the servers that host the conferencing solution, and an on-site, customerpremise-based server installation (using customer premise equipment, or CPE). While NetMeeting falls into the latter CPE class, the advantages of both deployment models merit careful consideration. While NetMeeting users and other customers that host their own web conferencing servers typically argue that the CPE approach has cost, control, and security advantages, many organizations are opting for the ASP “software as a service” model. In particular, the ASP approach frees the customer from managing the deployment of web collaboration software (so it can concentrate on other IT projects), accommodates scale for large events and usage growth, satisfies the need for inter-organizational network connectivity, has proven security, and a dedicated support group. Next comes the challenge of determining the incremental productivity gains offered by a web collaboration solution and weighing those gains against the incremental costs of the new solution. On a base level, if a solution were available that enabled conferencing beyond the firewall, it’s possible that employees who currently meet in person when they need to see outside vendors would become more likely to meet using web conferencing, a more cost effective, efficient, and therefore productive Kicking the NetMeeting Habit 8 alternative. 5 The more powerful – but harder to quantify – productivity gains become realized when cross-organizational teams begin to use web conferencing as needed to make quicker, more informed decisions. Can you assign a dollar return on getting a product to market a day sooner, with the right features as discovered through web conferences between product developers and customers, or in closing the big sale due to quick communications between all involved? Other elements to consider include the use of web conferencing to accelerate specific business processes. Specialized web collaboration applications are available to help with the sales process, customer support, web seminars and events, and how virtual teams manage their documents and their communications. These web-based applications, which are available virtually instantly via the ASP model, not only encourage the use of web collaboration by putting it in context within the application, but also can save the cost of having to find, purchase, integrate, and deploy additional workflow solutions. A suite that is based around a common architecture and user interface also minimizes training and support costs while encouraging employees to use multiple real-time as well as document repository applications. Last, but certainly not least, is the consideration of the vendor’s role in the transition from NetMeeting to a new web collaboration solution. How much help with the transition is the vendor willing to commit to providing? What is the vendor’s reputation for working closely with an organization to help ensure a successful deployment? What about the critical days right after deployment – how much user training and support can you expect the vendor to provide? Implementation of new solution. Change is challenging under any circumstances; changing from a product like NetMeeting can be even harder. Once you have applied the preceding criteria to select the right solution, it is never too soon to start preparing for the change. Users need to understand how the change will ultimately benefit them, and they need the proper training to feel comfortable with their ability to make the change and start realizing the benefits from it. Specific areas to plan for are the implementation of the new web collaboration solution (minimally it must be available, easy-to-use, and reliable to make a favorable first impression), and proactive training to familiarize and win over the user base. Unleashing the Potential: Life After NetMeeting Life after NetMeeting takes on new meaning by being rich, and hassle-free. Described below are three very different organizations from three very different industries that have kicked the NetMeeting habit in favor of more productive, state-of-the-art web collaboration solutions. Each one took a different approach to making the transition away from NetMeeting, and each is benefiting significantly from the change. The potential for increased productivity is significant: A recent study conducted for WebEx, sponsor of this white paper, by survey.com (“NetMeeting Usage Survey,” December, 2005) indicated that 58 percent of respondents used in-person meetings as their primary way of meeting with non-company employees. 9 5 Copyright © 2006 Wainhouse Research, LLC Global Electronics Manufacturer: The Gradual Withdrawal Method Faced with a need to frequently collaborate with larger audiences and realizing the major addiction to NetMeeting on the part of thousands of its core product developers, this organization chose to move from NetMeeting to an ASP deployment from WebEx on a gradual basis, phasing out the former and increasing usage of the latter over time. Before: Life with NetMeeting. The company has between 27,000 and 28,000 unique users, about half of whom have historically used NetMeeting at least once a month. Supporting this level of usage required the resources of one-tenth of one full-time employee (FTE) monthly – plus a few dozen calls to the help desk. Yet the company has no measurement of NetMeeting usage, and also found NetMeeting to be unstable for larger meetings. It also refuses to let users include the video capability within NetMeeting because of the inability to control its impact on other network applications. After: Life with the ASP Solution. The company’s services manager’s approach to gradually weaning employees off of NetMeeting has been to start driving its obsolescence, through early change management. Thousands of users are being trained on WebEx services as an alternative to NetMeeting, and “once users are trained, they’re converted – they do not want to go back,” according to the services manager. Usage of the new ASP solution is increasing by 20 percent annually. The company is seeing significant benefits from its ASP implementation, including the following. • A full 58% of all the company’s meetings of 10 or fewer people also include external partners; many of these meetings traditionally required extensive travel. Now the company can use ASP web collaboration services for this purpose, eliminating the time and expense of travel to meetings. The company is now able to operate far more productively through collaboration among partners in different parts of the world. Application development teams in the US can work with a partner in Malaysia that provides system controls, with web conferencing enabling their collaboration and driving faster product development cycles. The ASP solution has allowed the company to hold major large events, including one that attracted nearly 700 attendees. In addition, the company is now holding 5,200 meetings per month via web conferencing with 40,000+ attendees. • • The services manager looks forward to implementing additional web conferencing services more broadly over time. The company recognizes that conferencing services are not its core competency and it is likely to continue to deploy the bulk of its web collaboration in an ASP model. Enterprise Print Management Solutions (EPMS): The “Cold Turkey” Approach The printing management software company EPMS had a series of disastrous experiences with NetMeeting that inspired a swift change to an ASP-based WebEx solution. Kicking the NetMeeting Habit 10 Before: Life with NetMeeting. EPMS started out using NetMeeting in the late 1990s as a sales tool for meetings with prospects and customers. The company, however, quickly found it to be unstable and unreliable: “It would crash constantly during demonstrations,” according to Carol Andersen, chief executive officer. The company decided to move to WebEx services about five years ago. “NetMeeting is okay for applications that are not dependent on looking at people’s data – for low-level applications. But for what we do, no.” After: Life with WebEx. EPMS uses WebEx about 15 hours a week, or 60 hours a month (not insignificant for a relatively small company), for sales as well as client training and support. “We could not conduct our business without this product,” says Andersen. Financial improvement and enhanced productivity have been the main benefits of using WebEx at EPMS. • Net revenue has been positively affected by using WebEx to sell to companies throughout the US. For example, upgrades of the company’s software generate an average of $15,000 a month in sales, and because the process can be handled via web conferencing, none of that revenue has to be allocated to outside travel costs. Reducing the cost of sales has increased the company’s profit margins. Its annual cost of sales amounted to about $247,000. But by using WebEx to eliminate travel time and costs, the company can reduce that by 40%, adding almost $100,000 in profit to the bottom line. The company also conducts client training frequently, which can be much less costly if it does not have to be performed onsite. “We’re actually making money on WebEx,” explains Andersen. “If we do a training session and charge $187 an hour for that training, our cost using WebEx is only $30 an hour.” Some training still must be conducted onsite, but approximately 40% can be accommodated using web conferencing. • • WebEx is also increasing EPMS’ productivity by enabling the company to train resellers in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand without losing valuable time to travel. And its development team holds WebEx meetings with contract developers located throughout the US. Large Equipment Manufacturer: Desperate Times, Desperate Measures After “hitting the wall” with NetMeeting – inability to scale, to increase meeting capacity, to collaborate with external partners – this multi-billion dollar company turned to WebEx services to deliver the capabilities to meet its needs. Before: Life with NetMeeting. The company began using NetMeeting when it was introduced in 1996 as a way to limit the need for extensive travel in the wake of the company’s global growth. Its NetMeeting infrastructure eventually grew to two Databeam T.120 servers and, at its peak use, it was accommodating 550 concurrent users. The problem was that the company desperately needed to increase meeting capacity and increasingly wanted to include external participants in meetings – neither of which it could do with 11 Copyright © 2006 Wainhouse Research, LLC NetMeeting. At that point, the company brought in WebEx to accomplish scale and handle external meetings. After: Life with WebEx. Since the company moved to an ASP-based implementation based on WebEx, web collaboration has grown from hundreds of concurrent users and low millions of minutes per month to thousands of concurrent users and well over ten million minutes per month. Figure 5 Growth in web collaboration usage 6 The company enjoys diverse benefits from the move to WebEx web collaboration. • According to the company’s Data Conferencing Manager, NetMeeting was constraining the growth of web conferencing within the company – and WebEx “took the lid off and let it grow.” More web conferencing means more productivity, especially when more external meetings can be held in this way, without the time and expense of travel to meet with partners or customers. External meetings now account of 30% of all the company’s meetings, with a total of 20,000 external meetings a month using WebEx services. The WebEx service is supported within the company by a staff of two to three people. A CPE alternative to NetMeeting that had been researched would have required about 10 to 15 people working internally to support it. Since implementing WebEx, the number of support tickets per million minutes of meetings has dropped by 80%. As the number of minutes per month continues to increase, economies of scale will add to this advantage. • • 6 Source: Customer data 12 Kicking the NetMeeting Habit The Data Conferencing Manager anticipates that the next surge in web conferencing will come from an increase in ad hoc usage. The company is aggressively deploying IM integration with Windows Messenger, and there are plans to integrate WebEx web conferencing with Live Communications Server later in 2006. The manager also emphasized a key factor: the increase in collaboration with participants outside of the company makes access to an external network infrastructure with the capacity to scale very important – and a key factor in their choice of a service provider. Conclusion While NetMeeting has played an important role in the early adoption of web conferencing – primarily by being a “free” component of Windows that fulfilled early data conferencing needs – it has at least two major shortcomings as identified in this paper that can severely limit the adoption of web collaboration in organizations. The fact that Microsoft has discontinued the product, combined with the reality that the industry now offers second generation web collaboration products and services with very competitive flat-rate pricing, provides further incentive for NetMeeting users to switch sooner rather than later. As shown in the three illustrated cases, removing the constraints of NetMeeting can unleash adoption – enabling organizations to begin to realize the full potential of the latest web collaboration solutions for increased productivity and competitive gain. Those who wait to make the transition are being penny wise and pound foolish. 13 Copyright © 2006 Wainhouse Research, LLC About the Authors Andy Nilssen is a Senior Analyst & Partner at Wainhouse Research, where he is a consultant to rich media conferencing vendors, network infrastructure vendors, end users, government agencies, end users, and venture capitalists. Andy is a co-author of WR's annual three volume series Rich Media Conferencing, the firm’s thorough analysis of the conferencing industry, is co-lead analyst for the Wainhouse Research WebMetrics web conferencing research program, and leads the WR web conferencing and IM & Presence practice. Earlier in his career, Andy managed the planning and launching of PictureTel's Venue and Concorde group videoconferencing systems. Andy has 25 years of experience in high-technology product marketing and market research, earned his MBA and BSEE degrees from the University of New Hampshire, and holds two ease-of-use related patents. He can be reached at andyn@wainhouse.com Alan Greenberg is a Senior Analyst & Partner at Wainhouse Research. Alan has worked in the telecommunications, videoconferencing, software and services, and multimedia arenas for more than 20 years, holding marketing positions with VTEL, Texas Instruments, and several Austin, Texas-based startups. He has conducted research into dozens of distance learning and e-Learning programs and covers managed services, 3G wireless conferencing, and management software for WR. He is co-lead analyst on the Wainhouse Research WebMetrics research program, and has authored many research notes on web conferencing and e-Learning vendors at www.wrplatinum.com. Alan holds an M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin and a B.A. from Hampshire College. He can be reached at agreenberg@wainhouse.com. About Wainhouse Research Wainhouse Research (www.wainhouse.com) is an independent market research firm that focuses on critical issues in rich media communications, videoconferencing, teleconferencing, and streaming media. The company conducts multi-client and custom research studies, consults with end users on key implementation issues, publishes white papers and market statistics, and delivers public and private seminars as well as speaker presentations at industry group meetings. Wainhouse Research publishes a variety of reports that cover the all aspects of rich media conferencing, and the free newsletter, The Wainhouse Research Bulletin. WR’s subscription content service can be found at www.wrplatinum.com. About WebEx WebEx (www.webex.com) is the leading provider of Web communications services that enable greater productivity and cost-efficiency across the enterprise. Powered by the industry’s only globally distributed information-switching network, specifically designed for the delivery of multimedia Web communications. WebEx’s online meeting and Web conferencing services include WebEx Meeting Center™, WebEx Event Center™, WebEx Training Center, WebEx Support Center, WebEx Sales Center and Presentation Studio. Kicking the NetMeeting Habit 14