What is Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 is simply a fancy name for the "next generation" of the Internet. It is a term used to reference the many different facets of how the Internet can be leveraged for business, development, communication, collaboration, e-commerce, etc.
With the growing popularity of Software as a Service (SaaS), more and more companies are thinking about the possibilities of running all their traditional desktop applications directly on the Web. The "old generation" of the Web had a simple function: serve up webpages from a variety of sites, click, click, click. Web 2.0 goes beyond this, where companies can access their corporate applications directly from a computer that has an Internet connection. There is no need for a VPN or special firewall configurations, thus, remote employees and knowledge workers can work as if they were on the corporate network. The significant benefits for a small business are obvious in terms of cost savings and IT resources.
I think the simplest way to think about Web 2.0 is that of a Global Web Platform, one that interconnects Internet applications we are familiar with: Google, Blogging, Flickr, Wikipedia, My Space, LinkedIn, Napster, Search Engine Optimization, Internet Marketing, etc.
Back in 1996, a little unknown company called WebEx created a real-time communications platform called the "MediaTone Network." This information switching architecture provided the first and only video, audio, and data communications platform. With the new wave of Web 2.0, I think it will be very interesting to see how WebEx leverages MediaTone as a potential "Application Exchange" for not only customers but for partners, vendors, anyone who is looking to conduct business on this WebTrust and SAS-70 Certified Platform. I could also see WebEx personalizing the WebEx experience by integrating RSS feeds, blogs, photo sharing, music file management. Imagine if WebEx created a My WebEx page that automatically served all the pertitent information you wanted so that the first thing you did when you got into your office was to log on to your My WebEx page to check your email, calendar, access docuements, read real-time RSS feeds, viewing WebEx recorded meetings, conduct WebEx meetings!
Web 2.0 opens the doors for companies like WebEx. Over the last 10 years, WebEx has changed the way companies conduct business over the Internet. Subrah Iyar, President and CEO, has a strategic vision that over 25,000 corporate customers have already bought into. Dave Berman, the Master Arctitect and VP of Worldwide Sales, has successfully executed Subrah's vision from a revenue generation and market share penetration standpoint. The combination of Subrah and Dave, along with a very experienced and proven executive team, we can only expect to see some incredible and inspiring technology innovations.
I think in the next 3-5 years, WebEx will have the a significant impact on Web 2.0 and how businesses and consumers communicate over the Internet.
A comprehensive description and history on Web 2.0 can be found here: Wikipedia

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

NetMeeting is a Dinosaur!!!

Every now and then I will come across a company that still uses NetMeeting as a customer-facing communication tool. I never understand why a company would subject their customers, partners, or prospects to the time consuming process required to establish a connection with NetMeeting. Imagine starting a customer meeting with, "Sure Mr. Customer, I can show you a quick demo of my product but can you first get your IT Admin on the phone so we can ask him/her if it's okay to open up ports in the firewall, make a quick configuration to the proxy server, and provide us with your IP address so I can get connected to you? Second, if other people want to see the demo, great but they have to watch the demo with you on your computer since NetMeeting is designed for only one on one's and it's daisy chain architecture creates a performance bottleneck if more people join...Thanks."

After spending 10-15 minutes finding the IT Admin and establishing a connection, you finally begin the demo. Five minute pass by and the customer asks if they can "test drive" the application. (They can't with NetMeeting) Then they ask if it's your product or NetMeeting that is slow. (You tell them it's NetMeeting of course but wonder if the customer thinks otherwise.) Then the meeting abruptly ends for no reason but you tell the customer that you accidently closed the connection and apologize. Finally, as you wrap things up, you wonder why they said, "Well, the budget is really tight right now. We are just collecting information and doing a tirekicking session, thanks for your time. We'll get back to you when things start picking up." (How to Establish a Netmeeting Connections Through a Firewall)

This is a scenario that I hear all the time from my personal customers who reduced their technology risk and made the switch.

If this isn't enough to get companies to start looking at alternative high-touch web collaboration solutions, how about the fact that Microsoft has discontinued this FREE product! (Download NetMeeting at CNET.com) What's Microsoft saying about their very own technology if they discontinue it and no longer support it? In addition, it lacks tools to monitor usage, lacks API's for integration, and does not support a record and playback capability necessary for compliance with new requirements for audit trails such as Sarbanes-Oxley.

Bottom line...NetMeeting is difficult to setup, not reliable, and is subject to many performance issues. It is a high risk gamble if you plan to use it for customer communications. Potential consequences...lost deals, lost revenue, lost market share, dissatisfied customers, update the resume, find a new job.

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

The GoToMeeting Buzz

I have to admit that there has been quite a buzz about GoToMeeting, maybe because it's a $49 per month product offering from a pretty reputable company. Citrix is a pubically traded company that sells Enterprise Application Integration Software, so they sell traditional servers, gateways and software for load balancing, application development, and resource management (Their flagship product is their Citrix Metaframe Presentation SERVER). Web collaboration is not their core competency, as 95% of their revenue comes from Metaframe Server sales.

Perhaps a bit of background would help at this point in time.

On February 27, 2004, Citrix acquired a company called ExpertCity and renamed the division Citrix Online, selling GoToAssist, GoToMyPC, and GoToMeeting. They are still very new to web collaboration, lack a robust real-time communications infrastructure, lack back-up sites, and have been know to subject customers to performance bottlenecks. I have heard from customers that it is a decent product if you are an independent IT Consultant doing a quick one on one, but not a good solution at the enterprise level since it lacks stability, key capabilities, and a professional look and feel.

GoToMeeting is built on a server-based "store and forward" architecture that relies on storing content and data on the Metaframe Server. This raises red flags for many companies from a security standpoint. I do not know of many companies that would be comfortable storing company information on a server outside their corporate firewall, but then again I wonder how many people are actually aware of how data is transmitted with GoToMeeting. Perhaps the only thing they are aware of is its $49 per month price. (Though they do support SSL data encryption, they have not earned any independent 3rd party security certifications.)

Interestingly enough when I scrubbed their annual report this is what I found:

* "Use of GoToMyPC, GoToMeeting, or GoToAssist services involves the storage and transmissions of customers' proprietary information, and security breaches could expose us to a risk or loss of this information and litigation, and possible liability."

* "Computer viruses could be introduced into our systems or those of our customers or suppliers, which could disrupt our network or make it inaccessible to our Citrix Online division customers."

* "We believe increased regulation is likely in the area of data privacy, and laws and regulations applying to the solicitation, collection, processing or use of personal or consumer information could affect our online customers' ability to use and share data and restricting our ability to store, process, and share data with these customers."

This should be a clear sign to any business that it needs to weigh the security consequences which may negatively impact the business against the GoToMeeting price. Is lost data, lost revenue, viruses, downtime, and dissatisfied customers worth it? Do you want to put your company's most important asset, INFORMATION, in the hands of a $49 per month product offering?

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

Live Meeting Lay-Off

Recently, I was at a technology symposium that focused on new emerging technologies and business process strategies. It soon became apparent to me that everything really revolved around helping companies become more productive, more agile, and more responsive to customer needs and market changes. It was all about "Convergent Collaboration."

Many of my customers have been talking about "convergence," specifically the convergence of audio, VoIP, video, real-time collaboration technologies (like WebEx) along with email and instant messaging. Traditionally, companies only have part of the capabilities and each from a different vendor. The problem is that there is no integration and no enterprise standard! A typical company has multiple audio providers to manage, maybe an antiquated video conferencing solution that is collecting dust, Yahoo IM, AOL, MSN, Jabber, Trillian for instant messaging, Cisco IP phones or something from Avaya for VoIP. It is all over the map, no common denominator.

By bundling these independent convergent capabilities into a single platform, the time savings, productivity and efficiency gains are tremendous. Imagine being able to host a real-time web meeting with a handful or remote individuals and then store the discussed documents into a central data repository located in your virtual "WebOffice." If someone has questions on one of the documents, they can jump on an integrated instant messaging solution to chat, place a VoIP-based video call, or initiate another web meeting. It's that simple since all the moving parts work together as one.

My prediction is that more and more businesses will enable their employees with an integrated communications solution that encompasses web collaboration, instant messaging, VoIP, video, web-based document sharing, and audio capabilities. Convergence of these capabilities helps extend value across the entire value chain and across the existing infrastructure while creating a corporate communications standard. The results... huge cost savings and measurable organizational productivity gains.

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

How to Lower Your Overall Cost Per Lead

If you look at a typical sales force, leads are generated the old fashion way: cold calls. A few drawbacks of generating leads by cold calling: time consuming, low hit rate, lowers morale, and rejection. However, the grand daddy of them all is the overall high cost and low numbers produced from cold calling. As an example, if a sales rep's annual compensation is $100,000 a year, that means each work day, productive or not, equates to a $400 a day pay rate. Let's say a rep does 30 cold calls per day and generates just 5 solid leads from cold calling for the week. That means each call, or really each dial, cost $13.34 while the average cost per lead is a whopping $400! What happens in situations if the sales reps does not feel like cold calling, is working off a poor call list, or does not have time to cold call because of time spent servicing exisiting accounts? Sound familiar? What do you think will happen to the lead flow? Will there be enough active opportunities in the pipeline to generate closed business? Think the sales team will hit their numbers? Probably won't even come close.

Sales is a numbers game. If you disagree, ask yourself one simple question, "Would you want more leads or less leads?" You probably have a good idea of what your win ratio is and what your average deal size is. Put the numbers in the equation: (number of leads x win ratio x average deal size = revenue brought in) If you increase the number of leads, you increase the amount of revenue brought in. Simple numbers game.

One of the most cost effective ways to generate high quality leads is through online webinars. You can quickly broaden your reach, penetrate emerging markets, and capture the attention of an executive who happens to watch your event during his lunch break, never having to leave his office to hear you speak in person at a hotel conference room hundreds of miles away. Get in front of more decision makers, you'll close more business.

So here is how online webinars work...

Let's say you are a consulting firm that specializes in Sarbanes-Oxley and other Compliance-related issues. You plan to do an online webinar on "SOX and Risk Mitigation." You put together a PowerPoint presentation and include a few short video clips of customer testimonials and success stories. Then you begin actively promoting the event for about 4 weeks via your website, newsletter, partners/sponsors, banner ads, Google ads, email, direct mail, etc.

An executive sees your event and is intrigued with the topic and decides to enroll for the event. You capture pertinent contact information like name, email, phone number, company name, title and even ask some customized qualified questions. He presses submit. Boom, your first lead. You then track where the lead actually came from: Google Ads, corporate website, newsletter, referral, banner ad, email campaign, a mailer, and prioritize the lead based on his answers to your qualifying questions. If he is a C-level executive that runs a $1B company, he scores more points than a non-decision maker from a company that generates less than $1M in revenue. If you have this information, your sales team can follow up accordingly based on the "hottest" leads. You also can identify which marketing campaigns generated the greatest ROI. If more leads came from the newsletter than from the direct mail piece, perhaps more focus should be put on the newsletter since it produced better results. About now, you should get yourself in the mindset of thinking "cost effective, repeatable, measurable results." Replicate this process over and over with each event and you will always have leads.

As you can imagine, online webinars can quickly generate more prospects in a shorter time period than cold calling. The leads are pre-qualified, scored for follow up, and were generated at a lower average cost per lead compared to cold calling. For example, you target 10,000 potential prospects with a 2-3% enrollment rate which equals 200-300 registrants. There will be "no shows" but you now have 200-300 potential leads of people who filled out your enrollment form and provided their contact information for follow up. By spending around $10,000 annually for an online webinar solution with a trained Event Producer, your average cost per lead is only $20-$30!!!

You can improve those numbers by sending follow up "Thank You" letters or inviting the prospects to view a URL of the recorded online webinar. You could also post the online event on your corporate website for playback, while capturing contact information from a short registration page before the prospect views the recording. More leads and no added time or resources were needed.

Would you rather spend $400 per lead from 5 cold calls or $20-$30 per lead from 200-300 online webinar registrants?

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

Software as a Service Viability

The old adage of "Never outsource your mission-critical business functions or processes," no longer holds true. More and more companies are seeing the benefits of a Software as a Service (SaaS) business model. It enables companies to focus on revenue-generating activities and lets the service provider handle the product upgrades, hardware, performance and network connectivity. IT departments do not need extensive training nor do they have to worry about implementation, database configurations, or wonder if the technology with integrate interoperably with the existing infrastructure. Deployment is a matter of days compared to a matter of months so ROI is achieved that much faster.

There is absolutely a paradigm shift to the SaaS model. Even giants like SAP are moving into this space for a competitive advantage. SAP is taking the NetWeaver platform and moving their Enterprise Services Achitecture (ESA) to a services architecture. They even went as so far to acquire a SaaS company to provide added functionality to their CRM/SRM solutions.

Microsoft is another company that is trying its best to adapt to a changing world where legacy software is no longer king. A source close to me in the Microsoft camp told me that there is much confusion these days. He is told to say that their customers still prefer on-premise solutions yet they went out and acquired Placeware 2 years ago to provide a SaaS web collaboration solution. (They have not been successful in selling Live Meeting to their customers. Even their Microsoft Gold Partners opt for WebEx because of the added security (WebTrust Certification), robust functionality, and real-time communications architecture where nothing is ever stored on the WebEx network.) Instead of admitting that the Live Meeting technology is not where it should be from a reliability, ease of use, or functionality standpoint, Microsoft simply says, "our customers like on-premise solutions. They do not like and stay away from Live Meeting because all content is stored on our servers." This is 100% correct! What company in their right mind would feel comfortable storing content and company data on servers outside of their firewall? Talk about increasing one's RISK exposure.

My personal recomendation to any IT individual is to look closely at the Live Meeting solution from an infrastructure and data transmission perspective. Ask them about the "iVault server" and how and why content needs to be upload, converted and stored on their server. Ask they why they cannot support video if communications are truly "real-time?" Microsoft is a great company. I own stock in it myself and it has made me plenty of money over the past 8 years but to invest in Live Meeting simply because it is from Microsoft is foolish.

One of the most successful companies in the Software as a Service market is WebEx and Salesforce.com IDC market research named WebEx #1 SaaS provider. From the IDC Report:

WebEx is helping customers experience on-demand software delivery by providing more people with access and exposure to the model," said Erin Traudt, IDC software as a service research analyst and co-author of the report, "Recent studies have shown increased customer interest in the SaaS delivery model and web conferencing applications is high on the list in terms of SaaS adoption."

The report also states that, "IDC finds that not only are cost-savings benefits and rapid implementation times fueling overall SaaS adoption, but also intangible benefits such as increased employee productivity and efficiencies are being recognized."

I predict we will start to see more and more companies following in the footsteps of WebEx. 27 consecutive quarters of revenue growth...hard to argue against the SaaS model.

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

Realistic Benefits of Web Collaboration

In a recent online poll that I conducted, corporate productivity, operational efficiency, customer service, and revenue generation topped the list as to components that were strategic areas of focus, followed closely by product development/innovation and lead generation.

The most common questions executives asked were the following:

• Productivity and Time Management: How do I do more with less? How can I improve corporate efficiency? What much does one hour of lost productivity cost me?

• Revenue Generation: How can I expand my revenue opportunities? How can I increase my customer acquisitions?

• Competition: How do I differentiate myself from my competition?

• Customer Focus and Service: How can I quickly support my customers? How do I keep them loyal? How can I enhance customer value?

• Market Share: How can I capture market share and gain brand recognition?

There is a huge paradigm shift from conducting business face to face to meeting online in a virtual environment that enables even the smallest of small businesses to have the global connectivity and international presence that typically only Fortune 1000 companies enjoy. Web collaboration technologies level the playing field and help small and mid-size businesses penetrate new markets, generate revenue, increase customer acquistions while reducing operational expenses and lost productivity hours. In short, web collaboration/web conferencing helps companies address the questions listed above by most executives.

Whether you reference The Gartner Group, IDC, Wainhouse Research, AMR, the benefits of web collaboration are measurable and very, very compelling to the point that companies like WebEx now have over 23,500 corporate customers subscribing to their hosted solution. (This number alone is about 5-6 larger than their nearest competitor, Microsoft Live Meeting.) Though it has been documented that typical Total ROI can be 200%-500% (ROI from travel costs + ROI from increased productivity), the greatest value is the immediate impact web collaboration has on revenue growth and customer acquisitions. Most ROI calculations merely focus on the reduced travel costs and productivity gains.

The true measure and value of web collaboration is incorporating improved win-ratio, increased customer count, new markets penetrated, new prospects developed, larger average deal sizes, shorter sales cycles, faster product delivery times and happier and more loyal customers.

The reality is that the biggest competitive threat a company has is not what the competition down the street does but the companies that get creative and add web collaboration to their day to day work flow. They view web collaboration and companies like WebEx as a competitive advantage.

Translation: As you are trying to "figure things out," they take business away from you, and take it away quickly.

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert