WebEx attacks SMB collaboration market with WebOffice

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October 11, 2005 (IDG News Service) -- A month after closing its acquisition of Intranets.com, WebEx Communications Inc. is launching an updated, rebranded version of Intranets.com's hosted collaboration software suite, a move aimed at expanding WebEx's share of the small and medium-size business market before Microsoft Corp. conquers it.
Santa Clara, Calif.-based WebEx is doing away with the 6-year-old Intranets.com brand. Starting today, the online suite of document management, project and contacts management, calendaring and database tools will be named WebOffice. The software will retain its current pricing, which starts at $60 per month for five users. A WebOffice Personal edition intended for single users is priced at $50 per month.
The Intranets.com business unit, which WebEx runs as an independent subsidiary, is being renamed WebExOne (see "WebEx to buy Intranets.com for $45M").
With WebOffice, WebEx is embedding its Web conferencing service more deeply into the collaboration suite, for an additional fee. It is also launching several new stand-alone conferencing products aimed at encouraging users to make online conferencing a routine part of their workday.
Adding WebEx Meetings to WebOffice costs $50 per month per host user, with a five-user minimum. The fee covers unlimited meetings, with up to five attendee participants per meeting. (Additional attendees can be added for a higher fee.) WebOffice Personal's monthly fee includes one meeting-host license.
WebEx is also launching two stand-alone products, MeetMeNow and PCNow. MeetMeNow works like a Web conferencing version of instant messaging systems: The application resides in the system tray of a user's PC and allows users to launch instant Web conference meetings with a few clicks. It carries a $50-per-month price tag. PCNow, priced at $15 a month per PC, lets users access remote computers through a Web browser.
With MeetMeNow and PCNow, WebEx will be going head to head against Citrix Systems Inc., which offers similar services with GoToMyPC and GoToMeeting. WebEx's fiercest rival, however, will be Microsoft, whose Live Meeting and SharePoint collaboration tools are aimed straight at the small-to-medium market that WebEx covets.
Intranets.com currently has a customer base of 9,000 organizations and 300,000 end users. By making WebOffice simple to deploy and intuitive to use, WebEx hopes to expand its share of the SMB market and become the collaboration provider of choice for small businesses and project teams at larger enterprises, according to Karen Leavitt, vice president of marketing at WebExOne.
IDC analyst Robert Mahowald said WebEx has a short window of opportunity in which to extend its Web conferencing dominance into a similar command of the small-business collaboration software market.
"Looking over their shoulder, they see Microsoft with a new version of Office and an on-premises version of Live Meeting coming out next

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