Skip to main content

WebEx


Cisco WebEx, formerly WebEx Communications Inc. is a company that provides on-demand collaboration, online meeting, web conferencing and videoconferencing applications. Its products include Meeting Center, Training Center, Event Center, Support Center, Sales Center, MeetMeNow, PCNow, WebEx AIM Pro Business Edition, WebEx WebOffice, and WebEx Connect. All WebEx products are part of the Cisco collaboration portfolio. All Cisco WebEx products are offered by Cisco Systems Inc.
History
David Thompson, the first vice president of marketing at Activetouch, coined the name WebEx in late 1998 as the company transitioned from its original software business model to relaunch as a Saas company in 1999. Traveling Software which changed its name in September 1999 to LapLink Software Inc., originally owned a software product called WebEx, which shipped to the public in June 1996. The LapLink product called WebEx was a utility to be run as a companion to be used for offline web-browsing, a feature subsequently integrated within most commercial modern-day Web browsers.Subrah Iyar and Min Zhu founded WebEx in 1996 under the name ActiveTouch. Zhu had co-founded Future Labs (one of the first companies to produce multi-point document collaboration software) in 1991. Zhu met Iyar, then a vice-president and general manager of Quarterdeck, when Quarterdeck acquired Future Labs in 1996. Iyar was named president of Future Labs, which had become a Quarterdeck subsidiary, and the same year Iyar and Zhu went on to co-found WebEx. On March 15, 2007, Cisco Systems announced it would acquire WebEx for $3.2 billion.
Traveling Software registered the WebEx trademark in May 1996. In 1999, after the original founder of LapLink returned as CEO, Traveling Software/LapLink.com sold the rights to the WebEx name to the company known as WebEx.
Securities
Before the purchase by Cisco, WebEx was featured in the NASDAQ Global Select Market.
Cisco acquisition
On March 15, 2007, Cisco Systems announced that it had agreed to pay $57 per share to acquire WebEx. The deal valued WebEx at about $3.2 billion, or $2.9 billion with WebEx's cash reserves factored into the price. WebEx's largest stockholder is Jan Baan with 9% of outstanding shares. In a press release Cisco said WebEx would "become a part of Cisco's Development Organization while maintaining its unique business model". Cisco has also said that its long-term plan is to absorb WebEx at both a technology and a sales level.
WebEx is not a free platform like WiZiQ or Moodle and fees are paid per "host" of a classroom or a meeting. Some organizations, however, have started to integrate WebEx with Moodle.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

History of webex

History Real-time text chat facilities such as IRC appeared in the late 1980s. Web-based chat and instant messaging software appeared in the mid-1990s. The PLATO computer learning system allowed students to collaborate on networked computers to accomplish learning tasks as early as the 1960s, but the early networking was not accomplished via the World Wide Web and PLATO's collaborative goals were not consistent with the presenter-audience dynamic typical of web conferencing systems. Several point-to-point and private-network video conferencing products were introduced in the early 1990s, most notably CU-SeeMe, which was used to link selected schools around the United States of America in real-time collaborative communications as part of the Global Schoolhouse project from Global SchoolNet. In May 1995, PictureTel announced LiveShare Plus as a general-use data collaboration product for Windows-b...

Software updates

Notable vendors with articles: 3CX Phone System: owner of 3cx.com, 3CX WebMeeting ACT Conferencing Adobe Connect Altadyn: owner of 3D-VirtualEvents.com AnyMeeting AT&T Connect BigBlueButton BigMarker Blackboard Inc.: owner of Elluminate, Wimba Blue Jeans Network BrightTALK Calliflower Cisco WebEx Citrix Online: owner of Netviewer, GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar Davinci Meeting Rooms Dimdim closed to new registration as of January 6, 2011 Elluminate Epiphan Systems eXo Platform with Weemo Fuze Meeting Genesys Meeting Center Glance IBM Sametime and IBM LotusLive iMeet by PGi InterCall LogMeIn: provider of join.me MegaMeeting Microsoft Lync Server Mikogo Nefsis Netviewer OmNovia Technologies ON24 ooVoo Openmeetings Oracle Beehive PGi PowWow365 ShowDocument Skype Starlight Networks StarLive TalkPoint TeamViewer ...