Adobe Acrobat Connects

Adobe Systems has announced the immediate availability of the Adobe Acrobat Connect product line for web conferencing. You might wonder why. The way Adobe sees things, documents are about collaboration. Users routinely create and share .pdf documents with others. So why not enable rich media communication about those documents? Why not try to turn the Adobe Reader client, present on most user machines, as a VoIP or conferencing client? After all, among the largest challenges for any IP communications provider is to get enough clients into the hands of users to create critical mass.

The Acrobat Connect products enable users to create personal web sites that serve as meeting rooms. A standard Web browser and the Adobe Flash Player software, installed on more than 97 percent of Internet-connected computers worldwide, completes the task. There's no software to download, because the client already exists on most PCs.

The Connect hosted service, which allows a user to moderate a web conference, can be used for up to 15 participants for $39 per month, or $395 per year per personal meeting room. Connect Professional, which starts at $15,000, supports up to 2,500 users at the same time plus interactive multimedia, integrated telephony, and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). Meetings can be recorded for on-demand viewing, among other advanced features.

To be sure, web conferencing remains a niche business. IDC predicts that the conferencing-applications market will represent more than $1.1 billion in 2007. Two of the biggest players in the Web-conferencing market are WebEx, which has two thirds of the market share, and Microsoft, which purchased number two player PlaceWare.

But if you believe IP makes possible the emergence in newly visible ways of many "long tail" market segments, then web conferencing might in a genuine sense be seen as a current segment that will differentiate even further. And there is growing evidence of adoption by enterprise and small business customers.

In a survey, 41 percent of Citrix Online small and medium business web conferencing users say Web conferencing is more popular than meeting in person (41% vs. 36%).
Well over half of SMEs surveyed (56%) say they use Web conferencing to solve problems they could not solve before.