Everyone is painfully aware that the business climate today is profoundly different from that of just a year or two ago. Along with this rapid deflation of the boom mentality has come some serious belt-tightening. Of course, those who’ve been laid off have borne the brunt of the new reality, but even those that remain gainfully employed are likely to find themselves dealing with reduced budgets and increased scrutiny of expenses. And it’s not just that the Christmas party has gone from bubbly to Bud; everyday costs of doing business have to be justified as efficient and wise.

Normally, an environment such as this would be an inauspicious time for new technology initiatives. But for at least one set of ‘Net-based firms, corporate spending cutbacks actually offer — in theory, at least — a selling opportunity. If tight-fisted managers can be convinced to see the Web as a vehicle for significant savings, companies that offer efficiency-enabling services can actually thrive in tougher times.

One promising example is services that allow that most fundamental of corporate activities — the meeting — to take place virtually rather than physically. According to Webster’s Dictionary, meetings are “a coming together, an assembly.” However, companies such as eStudioLive, Presenter.com, MShow, Evoke (now called Raindance), WebEx, and PlaceWare are marketing the idea that what’s important about coming together isn’t the simple fact of being in a common physical location, but rather the ability to exchange information and ideas. The Internet, they argue, facilitates that exchange while eliminating the costs and inefficiencies of transporting and gathering a group of participants.

“The cost benefits of webconferencing are tremendous,” says Felicity Wohltman, director of strategic marketing at WebEx Communications in San Jose, California. “Customers tell us that they are saving up to $4 million a year in travel costs alone.”

Stephen Blanchette, vice president of marketing at e-StudioLive in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, adds that for in-person meetings such as corporate training events, obtaining and equipping the meeting space itself is often a major cost over and above travel. But in addition to direct outlays, Blanchette points to the issue of opportunity cost. “With in-person events,” he says, “both presenters and participants must be taken away from their jobs for extended periods of time. When sales people, for example, are taken out of the field, that prevents them from selling.”

A Valuable Sales Tool

Physical meetings come in all sizes and for many purposes. At the small end of the spectrum, a meeting may be just a few employees brainstorming on an in-house project, or a one-on-one update for an important customer about developments in a product they use. On the other hand, stockholder’s meetings, product rollouts, or sales conventions might involve hundreds or even thousands of people.

The type of meeting also determines the nature of the interactions between participants. A project-oriented work meeting will likely be interactive and collaborative, while a product rollout will more likely take the form of a “one-to-many” presentation.

Just as the size, the nature of the interactions, and the media types of the information to be shared (text, graphics, audio, video, etc.) all influence the planning and support requirements for physical meetings, the same holds true for Internet-based approaches. So depending on their own overall approach to meetings, each company that utilizes web-meeting services comes to it with their own particular expectations and needs, sometimes general and sometimes quite specific.

“We needed a medium that would allow us to quickly disseminate product information to field sales,” says Ron Biggs of Aspect Communications Marketing, “and to set up a series of customer seminars that would draw high-level decision makers.” Based in San Jose, Aspect provides customer relationship portals, which are contact servers for managing dynamic customer contact transactions across both wired and wireless communication channels.

“A webconferencing system needed to be simple for us to use, and to allow us to animate our content,” Biggs continues. “And we wanted to make reliance on the speed of a network a non-issue. We also wanted a professional phone bridge that could handle international toll-free numbers. Plus, the show needed to have a redundancy factor, so that if it crashed on the presenter’s computer, we could quickly turn it over to another computer and continue the presentation.”

To provide web-meeting services, Aspect settled on MShow of Highlands Ranch, Colorado. According to account executive Scott Walters, the company’s current offerings break into two main categories. “We offer launch-on-the-fly, self-serve meetings using our NOWShow tool,” he says, “and pre-planned, fully produced webcasts using the traditional MSHOW tool, with basic streaming, storage, and content-delivery options available through our various partners.”

To use MSHOW, Walters says, a client enters an online portal site and fills in the requirements for the show. The foundation of a show is a PowerPoint presentation, which is pre-cached into the system of each participant prior to the show’s start. Participants need only an Internet connection and a browser (Netscape or Internet Explorer).

“None of the PowerPoint data is coming through the pipe during the webcast,” Walters explains, “so users on any connection speed share the same audio/visual experience, viewing the same content at the same time. The only aspects of an MSHOW that travel through the pipe real-time are an application demonstration or the commands for group websurfing.”

Like most users of webconferencing systems, Aspect was interested in a means of supplementing rather than supplanting existing meeting structures. “Our web-based events are not intended to replace face-to-face meetings,” Biggs says. “They are created to enhance and support the selling process by providing information of value. In addition to product updates to sales, we use the web-based system for product and industry presentations to customers and prospects. We have also begun using on-demand shows for one-to-few sales presentations, allowing the sales team to do a live demo of our software.”

Biggs feels that the addition of a web-delivered option offers Aspect a number of real advantages. “People can attend the shows without the pressure of a sales person,” he says. “We can talk to a large audience and get live feedback. We can poll the audience at any time and get real-time feedback. Plus, we are not limited to a presentation. We can make our desktop live and show the audience anything on our computer or on the Web.”

Playback On Demand

Biggs says that Aspect often records its web-delivered presentations and makes them available as Real Player archives, allowing those who miss a live presentation to go to the company’s website and view it at their own convenience. This same use is what drew PriceWaterHouse Coopers in San Jose to a system from Presenter Inc., also of San Jose.

“We utilize Presenter.com to webcast select events and seminars after the fact,” says PWC marketing manager Terry Fuqua. “The webcast can then be viewed by internal employees who were unable to attend, or by external clients or targets with an interest in the given subject matter. We utilize PowerPoint, and it seems to work well. The video is a bit slow, but tolerable.”

Fuqua says the company has been “very selective” in the use of event webcasts, reserving the treatment for events deemed to be “big hitters,” such as the Thought Leadership series of seminars. “I think it's a great way to get your ‘knowledge’ message out,” Fuqua adds.

Fuqua’s impression appears to be backed up by some data on the efficacy of various media types in learning. Pointing to a study by Chi, Bassok, Lewis, Reimann, and Glasser published in the journal Cognitive Science (issue 13, 1989), Presenter vice president of marketing Konstantin Guericke says the retention rate from hearing and seeing information together is 50%, while the rate for reading alone is 10%. Thus, Guericke asserts, “Presenter's iPresentations should be five times as effective as sending out a static text document.”

With iPresentations, Guericke adds, “there is no real back and forth. The author creates the online presentation and then distributes it via a link in e-mail, or places it on an Internet or intranet site. Once this is done, the viewer, using their browser, just clicks and views with very intuitive and flexible navigations.”

Interaction and Collaboration

While an emphasis on presentations fits the bill perfectly for some, others need interaction and collaboration between participants. Take, for example, think3, a Santa Clara, California company that develops desktop solutions for mechanical computer-aided 3D design (MCAD). think3 employees are dispersed worldwide, with R&D teams located in multiple offices in France, India, Italy, and the US.

“We needed the ability to communicate in real-time with colleagues thousands of miles away,” says Art Ignacio, director of educational operations. “Collaboration allows us to leverage staff members around the world at a moment’s notice for key projects.” think3 also wanted to augment its online customer care program with live education and training programs. “Because we offer a visual product that involves 3D objects moving around, there is a lot of power for us in showing the product in action. So we need the ability to do live demos and share applications with customers.”

think3 ended up choosing services from WebEx in San Jose. WebEx meetings, involve “hosts” and “attendees.” A browser plug-in is used to send information from the host that can be used by the attendee’s plug-in to recreate some or all of the contents on the host’s screen. Participants in WebEx meetings may communicate back and forth via the system’s IP telephony and instant-messaging features or use regular telephone lines.

During a meeting, the Internet connection of each participant is polled to assess available bandwidth, and compression of streamed media, such as a video window, is adjusted on-the-fly. The company says that performance is enhanced by the WebEx Interactive Network (WIN), a global communications network built on dedicated leased lines connecting six communication hubs at co-location facilities distributed across the United States, Europe, and the Asia/Pacific region.

“WebEx's network works just like a phone system,” says Wohltman. “The network dynamically links users’ desktops. There is no stored data, no conversion to HTML, and no forwarding of meeting content. Everything in a WebEx meeting is live, just like a conference call.”

In addition to a presentation mode, WebEx also has an application-sharing mode in which an application running on the computer of the meeting’s host is not only visible to but useable by the other attendees. Control of the application, including data input and use of interface elements such as menus and buttons, may be passed among meeting participants. A desktop sharing mode, meanwhile, gives shared access to the entire desktop, which may be particularly useful for troubleshooting during customer support situations.

Training and Demonstrations

The ability to share applications and view remote desktops has big implications not only for collaboration and customer support, but also for training employees in a geographically dispersed workforce. Al Sallette, development manager for Excite@Home in Redwood City, California, says his company adopted the technology out of an urgent need to train a diverse group of internal employees, as well as employees of cable partner organizations across North America and around the world. The company uses a webconferencing system from PlaceWare of Mountain View, California.

The system, Sallette says, “reduced the time it takes to deliver training, so that we could train more people at the right time — just before they would need to use the training — and with complete materials that accurately reflected the products.”

Sallette says that webconferencing has also lowered the logistical barriers to convening the right people at the right time for the right amount of time. “For example, I did a three-hour class with 10-minute Q&A sessions between each hour. Different people were able to join in from wherever they happened to be: first our development team, then an engineer from Netscape located in a different city in California, and last an engineer from Microsoft in Redmond, Washington.”

So far, Sallette says, the system has been used for training in areas including HR, technical, and sales. “It handles anything that you can display on a workstation,” he says, “including web pages, presentation slides, and polling questions.”

Excite@Home has also used web-based marketing seminars, collaborative sessions for software development, and special presentations. “Presentations work best for material that can be chunked up into 60-90 minute sections,” Sallette says. “They haven’t worked as well for role-playing, or for hands-on learning of how equipment works.”

Sarah Henderson, an account executive with HigherMarkets, Inc. in San Francisco, California, agrees with Sallette that webconferencing is not necessarily a total solution. “Face-to-face meetings are still critical for demonstrating the more robust functionality of our e-procurement engine,” she says. “But web meetings present an excellent opportunity to exchange a very high-level overview of our product offering. And in turn, it gives us an opportunity to collect critical information from our prospects in a cost-effective manner.”

HigherMarkets uses webconferencing solutions from Louisville, Colorado’s Raindance (formerly known as Evoke Communications). “Originally,” Henderson says, “we were interested in the ability to walk through a demonstration of our web-based product to multiple prospects in multiple locations without having to spend too much time coordinating mouse clicks. We've used the web demonstrations both internally and externally, and found the webconferences very effective.”

HigherMarkets’ applications of Evoke to date, Henderson says, include “using webconferences to introduce our product to college business officers throughout the US and Canada, to demonstrate our catalog solutions to businesses that want to participate in our higher education marketplace, and for internal sales meetings and training sessions.”

Overall, Henderson says that the webconferencing approach has proven very reliable. “Our market — colleges and universities — are among the most wired businesses in the world. So we have an advantage for web-based meetings in that we are working with very high-speed Internet connections. I can see the speed of the Internet connection being a real thorn in some sides.”

Leveraging the Infrastructure

Sallette says that one of the benefits of a web-based approach is that “anybody from anywhere who has a telephone, computer and Internet connection can join in. You don't need to go to some special place to meet.” PlaceWare marketing manager Kathryn Romley adds that you also don’t need any specialized equipment. “Webconferencing leverages infrastructure that most business professionals have at their finger tips — a web browser and a phone.”

Of course, with just a web browser and a phone, meeting participants don’t actually see each other live while meeting. “But you do see real-time visual content such as bar charts, pictures, and live documents,” Romley says. “Seeing the content leads to greater understanding and comprehension of the information being presented. And webconferencing offers its own unique ways of engaging participants through interactivity tools, like live polls, whiteboards, Q&A, sharing and working on a document together in real-time, and annotation tools to draw on slides.”

Beyond Videoconferencing

Romley believes that the level of information-exchange supported by webconferences goes beyond that offered by a traditional videoconference. “In a videoconference,” she says, “you see the person talking to you, but any type of visual presentation material does not come across well. And videoconferencing also requires specialized equipment that is fairly expensive for most companies. The company has to have one system in one location and another compatible system in another location.”

A number of these objections are addressed, however, by using the Internet as the delivery channel for the videoconference, which is part of the approach taken by e-StudioLive. “e-StudioLive offers two levels of turnkey systems,” Blanchette says, “with all the software and hardware needed to automate the creation, production and delivery of an interactive webcast. Any slide, camera angle, clip, text, or link can be shown as relevant content. The participants can interact with chat and surveys, or can watch an archive later if they missed the original event.”

David Matney, director of the Video Engineering Group at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill, uses e-StudioLive’s system for a weekly broadcast of grand rounds presentations for the Departments of Surgery, Pediatrics, Internal Medicine and OB/GYN. “These events go live to our residents at distant hospitals,” he says. “Web-based education greatly increases our ability to provide courses that are not always locally available. Beginning in the fall semester 2001, we plan to offer our medical students live presentations that are archived for later review.”

One factor that makes IP video workable for UNC is the system-wide availability of sufficient bandwidth. “We have a high-bandwidth backbone between all sixteen campuses,” Matney says, “and 100Mbps switched ports to each student desktop.”

Blanchette says the e-StudioLive systems provide on-the-fly control of the viewer’s experience, including video, audio, graphics, links to the Internet, surveys and chats. Matney, however, says that because documents themselves cannot be made full screen with the presenter’s audio during the live presentation, his department tends instead to incorporate document graphics directly into video and to play them back using a full-screen video window. “During PowerPoint presentations,” he says, “the primary information is the graphic and not the presenter, so it really isn't so important to have the video of the presenter at the same time.”

Matney sees the web-based conferencing technology as being “more cost effective than it is costly,” and he anticipates rapid growth regardless of any slowdown in the economy. “We see no end to the need for this technology,” he says. “We see education becoming equally balanced between on-site and off-site students. Web-based education, continuing education and telemedicine has only just begun.”

The same positive outlook seems to hold for business applications as well. Web meetings, Sallette says, will become “a widely adopted, ordinary part of the way we live in the business world.”

Walters agrees, adding that the challenge right now is waiting for the marketplace to catch up. “It’s still considered by many to be an idea and a service that is ahead of its time,” he says. “But a strong value proposition can be made for using these tools in the current economy. Without a doubt, they can save companies large amounts of money, and increase productivity by keeping personnel off the road and working at their desks. We expect to see a dramatic increase in webconferencing use across the board in the coming year.”

Phil DeLancie is a freelance writer based in Berkeley, CA.

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Company Contacts

e-StudioLive
Chelmsford, MA
978-244-0858

Raindance
Louisville, CO
800-878-7326

MShow
Highlands Ranch, Colorado
303-730-4900

PlaceWare
Mountain View, CA
888-526-6170

Presenter
San Jose, CA
408-536-0510

WebEx
San Jose, CA
408-435-7000