High Travel Prices Leading to More Web and Video Conferencing
With the cost of airfare going up, more companies have begun looking into video conferencing to see each other in real time time and web conferencing software to help them do it, according to analysts and vendors in the online conferencing market.
Dimdim is free for up to 20 users, and because people access it over the Web and Dimdim hosts the data on their own servers in a software as a service (SaaS) model, companies need not download software on their own machines. The enterprise version of Dimdim (which is how the company makes its money), supports up to 1,000 people in one meeting room, costs just under $2,000.
DD Ganguly, CEO of Dimdim, says this low cost and ease of use has helped the startup vendor, which recently took $6 million in venture capital funding from Index Ventures, Nexus India Capital, and Draper Richards, thrive in the emerging web conferencing market.
"The affordability has been a big part of it," Ganguly says. "Because we are open source, we can integrate and customize our software for our customers."
Dimdim is trying to disrupt the predominant key player in the web conferencing market, the Cisco-owned WebEx. WebEx is more expensive, with its basic web conferencing offering costs $375 a month for five users.
But a spokesman for WebEx, Colin Smith, says the vendor provides more upsides to businesses than cheaper alternatives like Dimdim, mainly around customer service. "If you have a meeting with customers and five can't get in, you need to be able to call someone and be backed by a quality customer service," he says. "These free services are interesting but have limited capabilities. They don't integrate with unified communications solutions."
Smith says that a couple years ago, WebEx customers primarily used the product for document sharing and to view presentations. But as webcams are included with more PCs and laptop computers, and WebEx increased its scale and bandwidth improved, more people have begun using the video conferencing feature.
Smith estimates that use of video conferencing has increased 20 percent month over month. Ganguly of Dimdim has seen increases in video conferencing use as well as overall improvements in engagement with virtual meetings. In July alone, the company hosted 32,000 meetings for its various clients.
Forrester's Schooley says that neither WebEx or cheaper alternatives like Dimdim offer the same picture quality as the telepresence system, but because of the expense of the latter, and rising travel costs, there will no doubt be a market for them moving forward.
"I don't know how long it will take, but video will become a part of what you do," Schooley says. "It'll be there and be assumed, especially if prices keep going up and you can get somewhere without making a bunch of [airport] connections."
