In the US, WebEx has become an integral part of business life and a byword for online meetings. The Web-based multimedia conferencing service counts blue-chips such as Boeing, AstraZeneca, Cisco and Kellogg's among its users.

Now WebEx is pushing hard into Europe and plans a new enterprise-orientated service from February. Using the WebEx system to conduct an interview, IT Week spoke to WebEx Communications' vice president of strategic operations, Praful Shah, about the system and its progress.

So what exactly is WebEx? According to Shah it is "a switched service multimedia network". In other words it is a piece of telecoms infrastructure that lets any user with a Web browser participate in a range of conferencing services including voice, a virtual whiteboard, application sharing, text-based chat, and video.

This allows online meetings that include product demonstrations, strategy planning, training, negotiations or virtually any other business collaboration imaginable.

WebEx is easy to use, with a simple colour coding system to identify speakers and impose order. In practice, WebEx is an intuitive system that makes online interactive meetings a reasonable facsimile of personal meetings, especially over ISDN or faster connections.

"Everyone knows the communications world is moving away from just voice," says Shah. "There was always this idea that video conferencing would get people off trains and boats and planes but the technology's been limited to the boardroom, or at least it has not been ubiquitous. We have put in a switched service network that is not exactly as good as talking face-to-face but better than talking on the telephone."

WebEx has become a standard means of communication for people in the high-technology business but Shah insists that it is not purely a tool for IT industry insiders. The technology sector accounts for a quarter of subscribers but manufacturing accounts for 23 percent and financial services accounts for 15 percent.

"It doesn't mean people won't fly to meet up but it's about how you communicate and train and support people," Shah says. "It's not unlike phones and faxes - it's just one step further. We see it as the 'media-tone', the usability of dial-tone but with broader services."

Attempts to move video conferencing away from being a room-based, highly expensive facility are not new and many companies have seen the possibilities of using the Internet as the transport medium. Products and services such as Intel's ProShare, Microsoft's NetMeeting, Net2Phone and cheap digital Webcams have gone some way towards making conferencing an everyday activity, but they lack scalability and advanced features necessary for group meetings. "[The other services are] like a walkie-talkie," Shah said. "You can't just plug in everyone in the world."

Shah hopes to make conferencing ubiquitous by offering the service through various channels, including telecoms carriers, portals, embedded software, and direct sales. Enterprise software giant SAP last year integrated WebEx capabilities into its MySAP Enterprise Portal, for example. WebEx is also a supporter of Microsoft's Tablet PC and the pen-based format should suit interactive conferencing.

In February, WebEx plans to begin offering an enterprise service with features such as integration with Microsoft Outlook, and personalisation capabilities that will let organisations offer services as an extension to their own brands.

The company has also bolstered its international management team and is adding new communications hubs, most recently in Japan, in an attempt to broaden its worldwide appeal.

Despite having become identified with the conferencing market in the same way that Hoover became associated with vacuum cleaning, WebEx has competition from companies such as Expertcity, which aim to undercut it on price or by offering a less bandwidth-demanding service. However, Shah is convinced WebEx has the advantage. "We think there's a high barrier to entry in terms of the investment you need to make this work," he says.

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ABOUT PRAFUL SHAH
Praful Shah is vice president of strategic operations at multimedia conferencing enabler WebEx Communications.

He previously worked at Oracle where he helped to launch the Network Computing Architecture and Oracle 8 database.

Shah has also held senior positions at Tandem and NCR.