 Raindance
Meeting Edition 1.0 and eMeetings
By Scott Chalfant and David Coleman
Scott Chalfant is the product manager for Raindance's just
released Meeting Edition 1.0 that has been in development for the
last two years. In my interview with Scott we cover some of the
trends in RTC that Collaborative Strategies has identified, and
also some of the trends Raindance has uncovered with their own research.
We also look at how this new tool meets some of the criteria of
e-Meetings, and where Raindance will be going in the future…. David
Coleman
Collaborative Strategies : Scott, Our research
has shown that over 85% of virtual or on-line meetings involve less
than 5 people and most of the time just 2-3 people. Has Raindance
also found this to be true?
Scott: Yes, we believe that you are on the right
track. We are seeing a trend towards smaller meetings, and we expect
the size to lower even more (maybe 1 to 1) as they get easier to
conduct. We believe that the more powerful the meeting tool, and
the easier it is to use/access, the more common small virtual meetings
will be.
Collaborative Strategies : e-meetings have been
defined by CS as a virtual meeting with a small number of people,
intense level of interaction between the participants, a high level
of security and persistence (i.e. there is an asynchronous component
to the meeting). How is Raindance's new Meeting Edition 1.0
offering these e-meeting criteria?
Scott: Raindance Meeting Edition 1.0 has been
in development over the last two years. We have had a working version
of it since April of 2003, and gone through two public betas (preview
in April of 2003) and beta (began December of 2003 and ended February
27, 2003). Thousands of man-hours have been put into this product
to make it easy for people to use for everyday meetings where people
interact, virtually in much the same way they would do in-person.
Our goal was to make these e-Meetings easy to access with a low
intimidation factor, so people can get into meetings quickly. In
fact, Raindance Meeting Edition allows people to get into a meeting
in less than 20 seconds with full audio/video/data conferencing—it's
not much longer than it takes to start a phone call.
We also looked at the idea of recurrence of meetings. When we talked
to Raindance customers to gather research prior to our product development
phase, many of them said they use the product for recurring meetings
that happen every week, or every month with same participants. Often
these meetings are for status updates (for a project team) and will
occur on a regular basis for the duration of the event/project.
Raindance Meeting Edition makes it easy to support recurring meetings.
Collaborative Strategies : Scott,
who do you see as the biggest competition to Meeting Edition 1.0?
Would it be Microsoft, IBM/Lotus, WebEx?
Scott: Well, we certainly see those vendors as
competition, but we see our biggest competitor being e-mail and
the telephone, which is the way most people set-up and hold virtual
meetings now. Our research has shown that some of our competitor's
products are harder to get into, cost more, and do not allow for
the graceful escalation from a simple one-to-one meeting to a few-to-few
or many-to-many meeting than Raindance Meeting Edition. We built
Meeting Edition purposefully to make it easy for both the meeting
initiator and the participants to get started quickly, and/or join
a meeting easily.
To go into specifics, one of the ways that set-up Meeting Edition
was to remember all of your past meetings, so you can join any meeting
without having to remember conference IDs, phone numbers, pass codes,
etc. We call this “context –based access”. The makes it easier for
people to join the meeting and removes a significant barrier for
virtual meetings. Overall, we believe that to get a high rate of
adoption of these technologies, we need to remove as many barriers
as possible.
Collaborative Strategies : Scott, you talk about
ease of access to a virtual meeting, but what about the other side
of the coin, security?
Scott : We certainly understand the need for different
levels of security in any collaborative interaction. In terms of
general security we use SSL encryption in login and registration
and provisioning the flow of the meeting. In addition, you can have
local storage of content (not on a remote server). We also offer
a number of delivery options. Of course our ASP service is highly
secure, but with Meeting Edition we also offer two other options.
The first is a hybrid or “hosted” model, where the end-user has
Meeting Edition hosted on an independent server at our hosting facility,
but they can control and administer it directly. We also offer an
on-premise solution, which as you know is much more common in certain
verticals – financial, aerospace, the intelligence community, etc.
David, you and I have discussed this issue of security in the past,
and we both agree that security is more of a policy and behavioral
challenge, rather than a technical challenge. In terms of security
and collaboration, it is not really either or (security vs. collaboration),
but it really has to be both, security “and” collaboration, and
the only way we see to meet that complex need is to provide flexibility
in the deployment strategy.
Collaborative Strategies : We
see e-meetings as the "sweet spot" for collaboration.
How is Raindance taking advantage of this trend? Any special pricing,
marketing or positioning that focuses on this "sweet spot?"
Scott: Yes, lots of things. We, too, see e-Meetings
as a sweet spot, with much of the value coming from external (outside
the firewall) interactions. So, our initial offer of Meeting Edition
is a free solution (except for the cost of audio) for 1-1 meetings,
for an unlimited amount of time. We see this as a good way for new
users to get introduced to the technology and see how easy it is.
Our goal is to get more new users over the access and complexity
of use barriers, and increase the level of adoption in all-sized
organizations. To that end, we also have introduced a pricing model
that is structured to drive adoption.
If you work on a small project team, let's say of 5-10 people,
and you want to meet virtually with that team, we have a 5 user
pack, and a 10 user pack-- $275/5users (integrated audio is $0.20/minute
additional), $400/10 users (integrated audio is $0.18/minute additional)--
to make starting costs low. We don't require you to pay for licenses
that you don't use and don't have the option of committing to a
year's subscription to get a special price. We believe our pricing
model is very competitive and much lower than what the other major
players in this market offer. We are also offering flexible pricing
plans that use concurrent seats, or per/minute/person plans. Of
course all of our pricing goes down with volume purchases.
In addition, we have a very strong service infrastructure, 24/7
uptime and support, and superior audio. We really focus on QoS (Quality
of Service), and make sure that our audio bridges are never over
65% of capacity, so that if there is a sudden spike in traffic,
the server does not go down.
Collaborative Strategies : Where is Raindance
going with Meeting Edition, what can we look forward to in the near
future?
Scott : Raindance's core competence is in real
time audio. But like your research, we have also found that people
work fluidly throughout the day moving in and out of both synchronous
(real-time) and asynchronous interactions. We believe that we have
done a great job on the real-time side, but are looking at adding
more asynchronous functions that follow the 80/20 rule. For example,
we are never going to be a document management tool like Documentum,
or OpenText, but we will offer some common document management functions
such as: check-in/check-out, version control, etc- the functions
that we believe 80% of our customers will need. We will not have
all the bells and whistles of a document management tool, but we
are just trying to provide the basic functionality that pertains
to e-Meetings. In addition to our Meeting Edition, look forward
to Raindance supporting more seminar features like polling, Q&A
and record and playback in the future.
Collaborative Strategies : What do you find to
be the biggest challenge to the adoption of e-Meeting technologies?
Scott : Education! We hired Brian Burch as our
chief marketing officer (CMO) and he is working on a number of marketing
campaigns to help educate more users. Microsoft is doing a great
job of educating the masses about the value of real-time virtual
meetings with their radio, TV and magazine ads. Our goal is to get
the message across that “it's not complicated, you don't need to
be an expert to use it and interact with others.”
Collaborative Strategies : OK, so what are your
favorite features in Meeting Edition?
Scott : I think the “Voice activated switching”
that we call the “follow talker” feature, is a useful feature. Also,
we value the ability to see multipoint video in the same screen
or interface, and PIP (picture-in picture) so you can see both yourself
and the person who is talking in the same frame. We have a pretty
flexible implementation for multipoint video, which allows you to
see the other people when you need to, and not use up a great deal
of bandwidth when you don't need to. To do this we intelligently
shift bandwidth, with the goal of keeping the bandwidth overhead
low.
Another feature that I am excited about, and we think that will
help to drive adoption, is desktop integration. We offer” XP-like”
navigation, which is contextual navigation within the meeting process.
We also offer Outlook integration and Web browser integration, so
you can view your bookmarks, homepage, and history from within the
meeting application. In addition, we have provided security at a
granular level so that you can display only the page you want others
to see.
We are offering features around what we call “enhanced participant
management.” Unlike some of our competitors, we allow the sharing
of content instead of presenting content. To do this, at the start
of the meeting we can start everyone as a presenter, which means
multiple people can share a file or presentation at the same time
or annotate at the same time. This allows for such processes as
simultaneous group editing, more visual reinforcement (follow talker),
and you can also see what others in the meeting are doing (mute,
etc.). We have done some interesting things around video, including
the ”take the podium” feature, which turns everyone's video off
in order to look at yours.
We are always looking to improve the meeting through features supporting
“attention management.” One of the ideas (not in version 1.0) is
how you (the presenter) can tell if those you are presenting to
are paying attention, or if they are busy dealing with e-mail, etc.
There are ways we could tell if other applications are in use, but
it is a very tricky privacy issue. At this time, we are not looking
to utilize any feature that looks outside our application. We don't
want to overstep our customer's trust in our service. What we do
offer now that is somewhat similar is in “participant details,”
where you can see who is watching whom.
Another aspect of “attention management” deals with permissions,
which is currently available in Version 1.0. There are a number
of roles defined in Meeting Edition: moderator, presenter, participant,
etc. What you can do is set access to a specific role, and because
this feature is very granular, you can even set this level of access
on specific features.
Collaborative Strategies : We see other types
of convergence occurring in the collaboration space besides the
convergence of audio, video and data conferencing. We also see a
strong trend that is pushing collaboration down into the infrastructure
layer. Does Raindance also see this, and if so what is your reaction
to this trend?
Scott : Raindance is a collaboration company.
We are not selling it as an infrastructure play even though we offer
a SwitchTower™ multimedia network. It is this architecture that
allows us to offer distribution models that range from ASP- to Premise-based.
The Switch Tower architecture has an open interface that can take
plug-ins (software or hardware) and goes a long way (we believe)
in eliminating barriers to entry. With this architecture, you can
plug-in software like: SFA, ERP, CRM, or hardware like a Bridge
or PBX or at the GDI level. Over this year, we will be making this
architecture more capable though partnerships for specific applications.
For example, we are considering APIs for applications like SFA that
will allow you to track the sales process and initiate meetings
when needed, as well as reporting the results of the meeting back
to a SFA tool. Another similar application would be for “Help desk
and support,” where real-time interactions can be integrated into
a specific support process.
Collaborative Strategies : What collaboration
trends does Raindance see, that we have not discussed, and what
have you planned in your product roadmap to deal with these upcoming
trends?
Scott : We will be doing a lot in the way of way
of partnerships, and looking at specific verticals. For example,
we'd like to offer some of our features to a broadband company so
that users can share pictures of their kids with Grandma. Or with
a hardware vendor, system requirements can be modified so that a
small business will not need to buy an expensive room-based video
system, but can get almost the same quality from the hardware vendor
(with our software) at a fraction of the cost. We also see opportunity
in the consumer market by identifying specific processes and then
partnering for an easily adopted solution in that process area.
Scott Chalfant, Director of Product Management, can be reached
at: schalfant@raindance.com
, or by phone at: 800.878.7326
David Coleman is the Founder and Managing Director
of Collaborative Strategies (CS) and the editor of " Inside
Collaboration " He can be reached by e-mail at davidc@collaborate.com
, or by telephone at 415/282-9197. |
