AT&T Buys Interwise

As predicted, 2007 has been a year of consolidation for web collaboration companies/technologies.

Google and Marratech for undisclosed amount
Cisco and WebEx Communications for $3.2 billion

Now, AT&T acquires Interwise for $121M. Interwise has about 130 employees with $20M in sales revenue and based in Cambridge, MA.

AT&T said that it expects to retain the Interwise management team, which is headed by Frank Zvi, co-founder, president, and CEO of Interwise. The company's domestic and international operations also are expected to be retained, AT&T said.

Thanks,

David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

Google Acquires Marratech

Google has quietly acquired Marratech, a video conferencing start-up company based in Sweden. Marratech was incorporated in 1998, has less than 20 employees and does about $1M in revenue. They were originally a spin-off from the Centre for Distance-Spanning Technology at he Lulea University of Technology.

On a personal level, I always thought WebEx might be a great acquisition target for Google but as it turns out, Cisco beat Google to the punch with a $3.2 billion acquisition of WebEx last month.

The Marratech solution is not web-based but desktop-based and has basic functionality like video, chat, whiteboard, etc. The solution includes a freely downloadable client and a server, called the Marratech Manager. The latter is available as a free server (limited to 5 users) and a licensed server.

The Google Blog stated that the acquisition was to enable Google employees, "Googlers," to share documents internally. Rather than Google building their own internal colloboration solution, they decided to buy Marratech.

Financial details have not been released as of yet.

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Blog