I just got an email from WebEx promoting some kind of upgrade for April 23, so I checked out their site to see what’s new in the past few years.
I guess the biggest changes are that the only free account option is for 14-days now. Otherwise the price is $20/hour per attendee. And they bought internets.com to add more colllaboration tools, like discussion forums.
Financial Perspective
Cisco paid $3.2 billion for WebEx last month. It’s a lot of money, but not insane. WebEx has revenue of $380 million per year, net income of $50 million per year, and is growing at 15% to 20% per year. WebEx has a solid brand, is the top brand in its space, and claims to have 28,000 paying customers.
Cisco, on the other hand, needs acquisitions to grow, and wants a toehold into software subscriptions a la salesforce.com.
Cisco and WebEx are good matches because they both mainly sell to businesses, and Cisco believes it needs to offer everything that has an IP address to its customers.
Technical Perspective
I was never impressed with WebEx because their product was always slow and bloated and didn’t have a reputation for being reliable cross-platform. I always thought that Microsoft should just get their act together, release a reliable version of LiveMeeting in the OS, and put WebEx out of business. But that hasn’t happened yet.
WebEx is up to 2,500 employees now. Hard to write tight code in that kind of bureaucracy.
Something to keep in mind with these Internet collaboration tools is the very high likelihood of numerous security holes. Citrix is the poster child for that. I could go on.
I’ve read a few interviews with the active founder, Subrah Iyar, ex-Quartderdeck, and was always impressed with how down to earth and straight-forward he was. In one Mercury News article the interviewer asked him what WebEx’s biggest problem was.
He replied, “Our biggest problem is corporate visitors seeing our typical one-story SV campus and asking us where the gleaming skyscraper is.” Later they put their logo on a tall building on Mission College Blvd.
WebEx does have a lot of competitors. Hopefully one can release a light-weight, cross-platform application.
But even now you can go far with Skype voice and text chat and a wiki or fleck.
TechCrunch: Cisco Buys WebEx for $3.2 Billion
wikipedia: WebEx