Webinar Wire

Summary Of Web Conferencing Vendors Available

Posted by Ken Molay March 4 2010 11:47 PM EDT

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A big tip of the hat and thank you to Susan Matkov who alerted me to a report from business-software.com. It is titled "Top 10 Web Conferencing Software Vendors Revealed" and has a copyright from this year.

There isn't much explanation on how they picked the highlighted vendors. Just a single sentence saying "we’ve featured ten of the leading Web conferencing vendors in this report." The big market share leaders who you would expect are certainly included. But there are also a couple of service provider/resellers in the list, which seems a little strange.

As is often the case with compendia of web collaboration vendors, it can be hard to compare products within use categories. This report includes products targeted at e-Learning, structured web seminars, and unstructured group web conferences. About the only thing they didn't include was classic webcasting products with streaming audio/video as the primary goal.

Much to their credit, Business-Software.com does not try to compare the featured products or vendors against each other and makes no rankings or recommendations. Each user's needs are different, and the features that make a product the right choice for one company may be unimportant to another company.

The main use of the report is a quick reference guide to key information about the companies and products. It is definitely not comprehensive... As I scanned the report, I was struck by the fact that WebEx has many of its collaboration products listed, but Event Center and Training Center are omitted. Citrix lists GoToMeeting, GoToMeeting Corporate, and GoToWebinar, but only includes pricing for GoToMeeting.

So this isn't going to replace your own research and evaluation, but it may help give you a condensed view of a few of the major players in the web collaboration space. If you are new to the topic, you will quickly find yourself amazed at the variety of specialized product choices available even from a single vendor.