Report From The Trenches :: The Real-Time Blog of yesterday's "State of the E-conferencing Industry:Today's Issues and Tomorrow's Solution" was an experiment in innovative online journalism. You can see the results of what came out of it on this special blog page I created for it.

Even more interesting, as my last comment clearly points to is the value created by the contributions and interactions of the audience with the topics being presented at the live event.

Unfortunately this content got the worst treatment, support and access of anything else we saw at work yesterday. Due to some unfortunate and absolutely non-sensical setup the Communicast Q&A roll would scroll away for any latest question forcing any participant to a psychofrenic task to try to keep up or even read what was being written.

But thanks to Heike Philp I am able to share this valuable content with you, edited and organized by topic. There is a lot to learn from it. Both from the end user viewpoint as well as from the vendors' one.

(N.B.: Where experts have provided their signature I have kept it. Where there was none, none remained.)

Here it is:

Major Players Business Strategy

Why are major players in the Web conferencing space like Centra still having losses?

If the WC market is taking off, why does major players like Centra still post losses?

- By our estimate there is only about a 15% adoption rate for these technologies today, that still leaves a big piece of the pie for everyone to go after. Once the adoption rates are higher, you will begin to see the bigger players start to dominate and in many cases acquire some of the smaller players. - David Coleman - Collaborative Strategies

- Centra is changing its business model, and they have changed some of their management also. They also tend to focus on e-Learning rather than just WC. David

- Major players like Centra have a dying business model. We believe that web conferencing is becoming a comodity, the solution offering the most features for the least price will win.

Thanks for the answer. Could you elaborate on that? what is their business model?

- It's a buyers market.

- With so many options and technology changing so rapidly, very few enterprise customers are willing to buy site licenses and pay a decent price knowing that in 3 months, new improved technology will be available for much less.

VoIP vs PSTN

Does anyone has any idea of the % of voip calls versus PSTN calls in web conferencing today?

- We offer hybrid PSTN and VoIP events and typically see that only 15-30% of the audience will use PSTN when given the option.

- I don't have figures, but anecdotally from our customers, we hear that VoIP systems often don't have the quality/maturity/scalability...yet. That applies to interactive/ collaborative meetings, not webcasting (where VoIP seems to provide good enough quality already).

- Look for vendor that have a commitment to VoIP and you will see better quality

Why would commitment to VoIP necessarily translate to better quality? Or do you mean better quality within the VoIP audio itself?

- Some vendor develop and integrate their own VoIP others have loose partnerships to say they have it but it is not core to their product offering.

Future Trends for Service Providers

What is the next strategic move required by Service Providers to stay current?

- Those that offer collaboration only through ASP need to offer a "premise" based model also. What we (CS) thinks will differentiate service providers is the "handholding" and support that they offer. David

- Service providers need to adapt their offerings around what their customers want. CPE, hosted, ASP models - each are interesting to different customers. Note that to a point, this is already happening. However, it has to happen much faster! - Ira Weinstein - Wainhouse Research

Early Adopters: Who Are They?

Are there any type of companies or industries that are embracing collaboration technologies more?

- Financials, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, legal, EDU are among the verticals embracing collaboration aggressively. We see adoption within small, medium, and large enterprises. Important distinction - companies that value efficiency and embrace technology are typically into conferencing. - Ira

Videoconferencing

Will video conferencing vendors disappear?

- Some will, some will become more specialized, others will be incorporated into application solutions and morph that way. David

How Many Providers Can The Future Accomodate?

How many providers will be left in 3 yrs?

- Providers of what type of technology. CS beleives that the 30-40 vendors in the web conferencing space will drop to less than 10 by 2007 - David

Multi-Platform IM Systems

Looking for IM system that works with both Linux and Unix
successful for others - what's working great?

- one word JABBER

Thanx! I'd used that one before at EDS, but didn't kow if it supported both systems.

- there are a number of IM systems that can be hosted on Linix/Unix servers, what you buy depends on what you need to do with it - David
- JABBER has turned into a open-standards based IM

Why To Stream?

Why woud I ever want to stream through proprietary technologies (Microsoft, Real) when I can feed directly audio and video live within reasonable bandwidth limits (see Voxwire, Flashcom, etc.)?

Why do we need to stream, by encoding, compressing, and redistributing in propietary formats?

- Umm. maybe because Windows Media streaming doesn't cost anything

- for future reference... these topics are generally discussed at the following IRC channel irc://irc.freenode.net/#joiito

Interoperability? Open standards?

- There are few standards in the collaboration space, but with the larger vendors getting into the space more standards are emerging! - David

- XMPP from the group that did Jabber is really starting to get momentum

- Some of the existing standards for collaboration, like T.120, present problems of their own (e.g. firewall-friendliness).

Impact of Social Software

How about the impact and adoption of 'social software" and its general effect in the streaming media space? How much are social networking tools really useful? Or are they really proving to be a popularity test? ("I've got xxx direct contacts so I must be popular!")

- There is some of that. What we have seen in social networks is that it is important for not only the inquirer but the answerer to see value in the network, which I think many companies are still working on. - David

Here the profiles of the experts who attended:

Audio - Dan Rayburn, EVP, StreamingMedia.com, addressed the technology you are hearing so much about - VoIP or streaming audio.

Convergence - Ira Weinstein - Wainhouse Research, Senior Analyst and Consultant at Wainhouse Research, discussed convergence of technologies and applications trends..

Collaboration - David Coleman, Founder and Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies, discussed the critical factors for adoption of collaboration technologies in an organization and how to make sure it spreads throughout.

Weblogs & RSS - Alex Williams, President and Founder of DecisionCast, discussed the integration of new applications and formats into e-conferencing environments such as extending webcasts to mobile event spaces, using RSS and Weblog technology.

More coverage and lessons learned from this event here.

Robin Good