The way of the Web: Webconferencing for beginners For remote presentations and meetings, webconferencing can be as simple or as sophisticated as you need it to be - but with dozens of service vendors, choosing the right one can be a daunting task. Here's what you need to know to find a good fit. By Scott D. Smith - March 02, 2001 Webconferencing has definitely arrived, with dozens of vendors vying for customers in an industry that's expected to generate $5 billion in software and service fees by 2003 - the same year the fledgling industry's revenues are expected to surpass those generated by audio teleconferencing. Typically, webconferencing (also known as dataconferencing) consists of a live PowerPoint-style presentation delivered over the Internet with a synchronous telephone call. If the ultimate goal is to deliver a slideshow presentation at low cost without a lot of fuss, webconferencing can't be beat as an easy, inexpensive alternative to full-scale videoconferencing. What's more, a host of other features -including application sharing, participant polling and whiteboard functions - are available to supplement this basic format and give webconferencing presenters some truly unique interactive opportunities. Lewis Ward, senior analyst at collaborative Stjg~gjes, a market research and consulting firm that specializes in dataconferencing, says that webconferencing is currently the fastest growing real-time collaborative technology, a category that also includes audio teleconferencing and videoconferencing. Ward predicts that videoconferencing revenues will total $5.4 billion in 2001, followed by audioconferencing at $3.2 billion and data conferencing at $1.9 billion. By 2003, videoconferencing is expected to maintain its lead with an $8.2 billion market, but dataconferencing's $5 billion market that year would surpass audioconferencing's projected total by about haifa billion dollars. "It's growing because of ease of use and the prices coming down," says Ward. "A lot of vendors are moving to become Web-based services, where you don't need to download or install anything locally. It's all Java or HTML." About 30 to 40 vendors of data-conferencing products and services are currently competing in the space, says Ward, and the competition should drive prices down over time. How webconferencing is being used today In a 2000 survey of webconferencing vendors, Collaborative Strategies found that the largest number of clients (28 percent) used data collaboration for communication across small groups and collaborative meetings. The next most frequent use of webconferencing was for e-iearning and training (23 percent), followed by Web marketing and sales (15 percent). Another 11 percent of clients reported using the technology for technical support and help-desk functions, and 9 percent reported using it for academic distance learning. Four percent of clients used webconferencing for project management. According to webconferencing service vendor Astound, the law firm Brown Rudnick Freed & Gesmer has used Astound's webconferencing services to facilitate the review and approval of legal documents with as many as 50 pages. A partner at the firm explained that in the past, he would send such a document to each person and go through the document line-by-line in individual meetings. Now, he's able to hold a dataconferencing session in which everyone reads through the document together - an obvious time-saver. Centra, another webconferencing services firm, reports that Nortel Networks - a provider of in telephony, data, and wireless solutions for the Internet - uses Centra's Symposium software to train sales reps in workshops of 10 to 12 participants. The system enables sales staff members log onto the company's intranet simultaneously and learn about key products. Webconferencing has been used to reduce the costs of training at CMstat, a 20-person configuration management company based in San Diego. Rather than making several trips a month to demo its products, CMstat now gives about half of its demos online, and it offers remote tech help online as well. The company reports that it has saved $26,000 a month in travel and personnel expenses by using webconferencing services provided by WebEx.

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