Webinar Wire

Hosted vs. On-Premise Web Conferencing

Posted by Ken Molay November 4 2008 5:45 PM EDT

When businesses select a web conferencing technology, there is a technical choice that doesn't get talked about very often. Where will the software live?

The early big names in the web seminar space were Placeware and WebEx. Both ran the software code on their own servers and clients connected to the programs via the Internet. That wasn't particularly common in the late 90's, but it is popular enough these days to have its own acronym: SaaS (Software as a Service). The alternative is to buy the software code and install it on your company's own computers (I'm talking about corporate servers or mainframes... Not individual desktop PC's).

Without going into a deep technical discussion and debate over the relative merits, the quick arguments are that a SaaS solution saves you from having to worry about installation, maintenance, and upgrades. It also relieves you of capacity concerns when looking at your internal disk/memory/processors/bandwidth. A premise-installed solution gives you more control over configuration, data security, and timing of upgrades. If something fails, you know the status and steps being taken to fix it. When a hosted solution fails, all you can do is wait for it to become available again.

Many of the large web seminar companies offer their enterprise customers a choice of using the software as a hosted service or as a premise-installed computer program. Others support only one of the two alternatives. Add this consideration to your checklist if it is important in your organization.