Cisco's Agent Model for WebEx

Cisco is formalized a channel strategy to sell WebEx via an Agent Model starting next year. Keith Goodwin, SVP of Worldwide Channels at Cisco has been tasked with putting together the channel strategy to help scale WebEx globally.

The goal is to compensate partners for reselling WebEx on standard 12 month or 24 month terms. Cisco captures and recognized revenue for at least a year and the partner receives a fee based on the annual term. (This agency model is new to Cisco.)

"We're going to give partners the equivalent or more of the margin they might make on a product by giving partners 20 percent of the value of the contract for the first year upfront when the customer signs the contract." said Edison Peres, Cisco VP and chief go-to-market officer for Worldwide Channels(The WebEx agent program will only be made available to Cisco partners that are certified in unified communications products.)

Cisco is in the process of identifying partners to include in a pilot of the agent program, which likely will run for about six months, Goodwin said.

"As is typical with us, we want to pilot it, listen to the partners on how it works, and tune it before we scale it out to the rest of the partners," Goodwin said.

It will be very interesting to see how this model plays out. If you think about it, WebEx has always been a direct sales model and over the past 8 years, the company has launched itself into a dominant market leadership role without having to rely or leverage on a globally dispersed partner program. The fact that WebEx can now lean on an established and world class channel program is scary.

Convoq becomes Zingdom Communications

Convoq has decided to pursue different business ventures and will discontinue its web collaboration focus. Below is from Christopher Herot's personal blog. Christopher is co-founder of Convoq.

Convoq, Inc., the company Chuck Digate and I co-founded in 2002, has been renamed Zingdom Communications, Inc. to reflect our new direction and new product line. Chuck has moved on, but over the past five years the company built an extremely talented and cohesive engineering team that pioneered the use of Flash and AJAX in real-time audio, video, instant messaging, and other forms of real-time communications. Our first product, ASAP, put these resources to use in the context of corporate collaboration. Now we are organizing the company around a new opportunity in more personal, one-on-one communication, concentrating initially on the telephone.

Voice communications have evolved considerably since the days of The Phone Company. AT&T has been broken up and reassembled and the locus of innovation has shifted away from the traditional providers of local loops to a new wave of companies who offer services that offer new ways of connecting people to each other. In this new paradigm, connectivity itself has become a commodity, although voice can be transported over the Internet or a wireless connection in addition to the traditional copper, and it is supplemented by instant messaging, SMS, email, and video. The voice on the other end of the line can be a person or a robot. In this world, the issues become finding the right person, allowing that person to control his or her privacy, and providing context that helps a person decide whether to answer the phone and be prepared when the conversation begins.

With all the progress that has been made, real-time communications applications are still a challenge to construct and deploy. Unlike the typical web application which navigates from page to page, a communications app must deal with events at both ends of the conversation. It's not enough to wait for a screen refresh to reflect that the party at the other end has closed the connection, but building a fully interactive AJAX application is a lot of work. Our intention at Zingdom is to provide real-time voice communication through a compelling user experience, and to enable partners to provide that same level of experience in their applications without needing to become experts in either telephony or AJAX. I'll say more about where we came from and were we are going in future installments.

In the meantime, feel free to check out zing.dm.
http://herot.typepad.com/cherot/2007/08/convoq-becomes-.html

IBM Acquires WebDialogs

IBM has acquired WebDialogs, a web conferencing provider in MA, that has managed to stay in business since its inception in 1998 by offering its services to more established companies to resell under their own brand. Through the acquisition, IBM has rebranded WebDialogs to "Unyte," and will be part of the IBM Software Lotus division.

Financial terms have not been disclosed, which typically means that it is not an amount worth mentioning or touting on the Internet.

I suspect that acquisition was a reaction to Cisco acquiring WebEx this past May for $3.2 billion. IBM has had a foot in the web collaboration space for years now with its IBM SameTime application. SameTime is an on-premise solution that traditionally works well within the firewall but once you try to tunnel out, it's complicated and unreliable.

IBM's positioning is most likely around the fact that they can now offer SameTime to its large enterprise companies while marketing Unyte, a hosted solution, to smaller businesses. This is yet another example of a large enterprise software company trying to get a foothold into the Software as a Service (SaaS) space.

To remain competitive, companies are converging voice, video, and data into a unified communications platform. I understand IBM's collaboration strategy and as much as it is on point, it is difficult to execute strategy with products and applications that have a track record for being cumbersome, unreliable, and not widely accepted in the marketplace. (IBM SameTime has about a 5% market share while WebDialogs has less that 0.01% market share in the web conferencing space)


Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

WebEx and iPhone

WebEx has launched an iPhone compatible version of its PCNow on demand remote access service for wireless devices and desktops.

The iPhone users can access desktop PC files, desktop search tools, Microsoft Outlook corporate mail, contacts, tasks and appointments from their handsets via the phone's Safari browser. The service also comes with SkypeOut functionality which allows users to make outbound calls even if their mobiles are not supported by the Skype mobile client.

WebEx's European vice president, Bert van der Zwan, argued that the service may encourage the adoption of the iPhone among enterprises when it reaches the UK later in the year.

"The iPhone has raised a number of security concerns with employers in relation to staff running and accessing business systems - limiting adoption by businesses. "We are introducing changes so that users can access emails as well as contacts, appointments and desktop PC files whilst on the move, via our secure MediaTone network."

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

Keeping an Eye on Google

Personally, I love tracking Google and seeing what new ventures they are pursuing. Word is that Google is looking to increase its prescense in the Chinese market. (China happens to be the fastest growing internet market in the world.)

Well-know search site like Sina.com and Soso.com are already Google partners. Talks about an acquisition of Baidu, NetEase.com, or Sohu.com are never ending but most likely never going to happen. The market cap of these top 3 search sites are in the billions and might not be worth the hefty investment...

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert