WebEx Interactions: A Web Collaboration Blog by WebEx

City Preparedness for Higher Gas Prices

What do you think these 10 cities have in common?

Virginia Beach, VA
Forth Worth, TX
Nashville, TN
Arlington, TX
Jacksonville, FL
Indianapolis, IN
Memphis, TN
Louisville, KY
Tulsa, OK
Oklahoma City, OK

According to Common Current, a California-based economic sustainability group, these are the 10 major US cities least prepared for gas prices greater than $4/gallon. It turns out that residents of these cities are disproportionately prone to long solo work commutes by car.

How are high gas prices affecting your budget? Have you started to explore collaboration tools to reduce travel and control costs?

I ran the numbers on my own modest commute (less than 20 miles round-trip, 26 MPG, regular gas at a delightful $4.59/gallon here in the Bay Area) and found – when all car expenses are taken into account – that Cisco’s WebEx PCNow remote computer access software pays for itself when I telecommute just one day per month. (And that doesn’t even include what I save by eating lunch out of my own fridge.)

The ROI on other WebEx collaboration services that eliminate travel expenses is even higher.

What are your commute mitigation tools of choice? Are you spending more time collaborating online and less time in your car or in Seat 28F? Is $4.00/gallon your personal “tipping point” to alter your behavior?

David Bockian, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Cisco WebEx

Change Your Behavior and Save Some Green

There have been a couple posts lately about the high cost of travel so bear with me as I weigh in. My plan had been to hold off writing my personal reflections on the topic until I'd actually paid more than $4 a gallon, this eventuality happened a little sooner than I'd expected.

One of my favorite sites for information about energy is The Oil Drum, which discusses energy in the context of the idea of peak oil. This post from last week on the price at which behavior changes definitely has me thinking. How much will the price of fuel have to be for people to dramatically change driving habits and start telecommuting more?

Before the summer price surge, I'd already done the mental math to determine I use about a gallon of gas in my relatively short commute, depending on the side trips I take on the way home. I'm now figuring out the best weekend errand routes to avoid backtracking (and I've noticed fewer cars on the road). I'm trying to work from home at least one day a week, admittedly more to get another hour and a half work done than to save money, but that will be a couple hundred dollars saved this year. Not to mention the environmental benefits of reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

Last week I also saw the headline "Ready for $262 a barrel oil?" on CNN/Money. I was surprised to see the article is 2 1/2 years old. The story cites a number of dramatic events, including oil embargos and civil war in Nigeria, which would drive the price of oil up over $100 a barrel within a few months. While it took a little longer, we managed to get there through the basics of supply and demand.

What will the price for a gallon of gas be this time next year -- still $4 -- or more than $5 a gallon? Consumers are starting to choose to fuel efficiency, so that will ease demand, but people still drive plenty of trucks and SUVs. The dollar is doing better, so the price of oil has receded slightly.

Ultimately people will need to change behavior just to keep the price from rising, because of the current supply and demand dynamic. Telecommuting and using collaboration technology, including web conferencing and shared workspaces have to be part of the equation if we want to mitigate the impact of rising energy costs on economic growth.

Michael Caton, Collaboration Evangelist, WebEx

Travel Costs: Rising Cost for Business and Pleasure

With gas prices through the roof and dominating the news this week, it goes without saying that sky-high travel costs – for both business and pleasure -- are on everyone’s minds.

On the pleasure side, this Memorial Day weekend kicks off the unofficial beginning of summer vacation season. Travel is expected to be low this year as a result of gas costs. For those who do find themselves traveling, separation anxiety from your home or work computer's documents, images or videos can be equally troubling. But, there’s no need to worry while vacationing (it kind of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?)— Services like WebEx’s PCNow keep vacationers tied to important documents and programs via poolside, hotel room or wherever their leisured lifestyle has landed them.

On the business side, work travel has gotten so expensive that employees and employers are requesting working from home 1-2 days a week and business travel is on the wane. These changes can be seamless – and cost effective -- by using web collaboration.  WebOffice, for example, is perfect for small businesses, teams or departments with remote employees that need easy and organized access to a console of documents, calendars and/or databases for interacting with co-workers as if they were sitting in the next cubicle – not several miles away.

Happy Memorial Day weekend from Cisco WebEx. Safe travels, both physically and online! 

Colin Smith, Dir., Public Relations, WebEx

Marketing Webinar: Casting a Wider Web

On Wednesday May 14, WebEx and MarketingSherpa are teaming up to present Casting a Wider Web. This 2008 Marketing eSummit includes a series of webinars from experts at Marketo, Wainhouse Research, the American Marketing Association and Loomis Group on using the latest online marketing technology. In addition to these best practice and advice webinars, marketers from Cisco and the Philadelphia Stock Exchange will also talk about their real-world experience.

Two of the sessions focus on presenting research. In the first, Stephan Tornquist from MarketingSherpa and John Miller from Marketo will discuss trends for 2008. In the second, Andrew Nilssen and Alan D. Greenberg, both senior analysts and partners at Wainhouse Research as well as Nancy Costopulos, CMO of the American Marketing Association, will present survey results about the changing nature of online events.

The 2008 Marketing eSummit is a virtual event – in addition to the participating in the webinars, attendees have the ability to interact in real-time to discuss what they’ve seen and talk to presenters between sessions. The full program for the event is available here and registration for the event is here.

Marc Blakeney, Sr. Marketing Manager, Consulting Services & Event Center, WebEx

Highlights and Happenings from the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo

Last week Silicon Valley luminaries along with emerging leaders gathered at the Moscone Center in San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Expo.  As I walked around the show floor I enjoyed seeing some of the new companies that have entered the market in the last year and hearing what people had to say about the conference and the industry as a whole. 

Going Green was top of mind for attendees, presenters and even the conference organizers who touted the efforts made to make the show more environmentally friendly.

Charlie Cooper of CNET News.com noted that talks of recession and its impact on the technology industry were heard all around the show last week and noted that the show was dominated by large established companies including Disney, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, Cisco Webex, Oracle, Juniper, Google and EMC.  Yahoo was also present and made headlines with the announcement that it will open itself up to third-party developers.   

Josh Lowensohn of WebWare took a lighter look at the event with his article on the mascots of the Web 2.0 Expo. 

WebEx provided attendees with a preview of the upcoming public launch of WebEx Connect at our booth while, our own Shankar Iyer was joined on stage by Raghu Raghavan from Act-On Software for a presentation on Developing, Distributing, and Monetizing Web Applications with WebEx Connect.

Colin Smith, Dir., Public Relations, WebEx

Great insights on using Web 2.0 Tech for Collaboration

Yesterday's TechWiseTV webinar on using Web 2.0 to improve collaboration and interact directly with customers has some excellent, practical suggestions for how to get started making the most of technologies such as wikis, blogs and social networking to accelerate your business.

Don Tapscott, coauthor of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything leads off the session with a brief overview of Web 2.0 via Telepresence. Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst Forrester and Robert Scoble, new Managing Director of FastCompany.TV get down to the nitty-gritty of working with the various technologies, from blogs to wikis. They both offer good insights as to the tangible benefits, such as better search rankings, companies can see through using the technology. They have some nice concrete examples of personal experiences as well as mini-case studies of successful corporate Web 2.0 initiatives.

Robert Scoble's example of how he saves time by calendar sharing with the masses, really rings true. Jeremiah Owyang's take on how to go about using Web 2.0 technology, through Forrester's POST methodology is particularly valuable. POST stands for People, Objectives, Strategy and Technology. Yes, do them in that order, find the right people, set goals, design a plan to a achieve said goals and find the right technology for the job.

Finally, David Knight, Senior Director WebEx Connect, shows how WebEx can help organizations securely collaborate in context, both internally and across organizations. 

Check out the replay between now and the end of the year.

Michael Caton, Collaboration Evangelist, WebEx

Enterprise Cross Platform Support: Mac OS X to Mozilla

Last week Forrester Research released a report detailing the increasingly cross-platform nature of enterprise PCs. The report indicates that the enterprise market share of Apple's Mac OS X is growing as is the share of Mozilla's Firefox browser. According to the report, in 2007 Mac OS X share grew 3x to 4.2% and Mozilla nearly doubled market share to 18%. 

As the adoption of Mac continues to grow among corporate users, Cisco WebEx has increased its support for the platform across its suite and just announced full support for Mac OS X Leopard and Safari 3 users across its entire collaboration suite. Several Mac-focused media outlets showed their excitement about the news. Check out MacWorld’s coverage.

We've seen Mac OS X use double recently, and while 4.2% could be described as modest share, the growth is strong. Sales of Apple PCs, particularly in the notebook segment, continue to be strong according to this MacWorld article citing NPD and IDC research.   

Mozilla's share in the enterprise increased despite not having an official MSI package to simplify large scale deployment. Forrester surveyed the desktop and browser environments of 50,000 users at 2,300 large to very large organizations on a monthly basis throughout 2007.

Colin Smith, Dir., Public Relations, WebEx

Kudos for MeetMeNow and coverage of WebEx Mac Support

PC Magazine posted a comprehensive review of MeetMeNow by Oliver Rist. The review touches on all the core MeetMeNow features, including presenting, document and desktop sharing, remote control, integrated audio and video conferencing. The review also discusses the reliability and security benefits of the MediaTone network. Oliver Rist covers small business technology for PC Magazine and looks at MeetMeNow from the perspective of a small business looking to collaborate across geographic boundaries.

This week also saw considerable coverage of our announcement of expanded Apple Mac support. Earlier this week we announced expanded support across WebEx applications for Apple's recently introduced Mac OS X Leopard operating system and Safari browser.

Expanding Mac OS X support for Meeting Center, WebOffice, Event Center and Training Center follows on to adding Mac OS X to WebEx PCNow in January. PCNow also supports Apple's iPhone.

Michael Caton, Collaboration Evangelist, WebEx

How to Conduct a Teleconference or Virtual Meeting

Esther Schindler at CIO.com wrote a nice article that gives pointers on how to run effective virtual meetings. As management consultant Steven M. Smith notes at the top of the article, many people in organizations don't know how to run effective in-person meetings. With so many organizations having geographically dispersed workforces, developing those skills and applying them to virtual meetings is critical to productivity. Pet peeves get deserved prominence throughout the article.

One of the first pet peeve examples, a meeting participant subjecting the entire team to hold music, ranks high up there in terms of being disruptive to productivity. Giving the meeting host the ability to mute the offending line really makes a difference. If one participant has dialed in from a phone with poor line quality or a cell phone, it can net the same result, the static or street noise can override other participants trying to weigh in.

Even for people that have good meeting skills, I recommend looking it over. The article is a quick read and positive reinforcement on the basics often lost to hectic workdays, e.g. including meeting agendas in invites, should pay dividends at least for the next month or two of meetings.

On the topic of editorial, I wanted to give my congratulations to Dan Farber and Larry Dignan at ZDNet. Dan Farber is taking over editorial operations for ZDNet's CNet's sister site, News.com. Larry Dignan is taking over for Dan as Editor in Chief of ZDNet. Having worked for Dan when he was Editor in Chief of PC Week (now eWEEK) I can say he is an excellent manager, editor, and writer. I also worked with Larry at PC Week and eWEEK, he too is a top notch manager, editor, and writer, best wishes to both.

Michael Caton, Collaboration Evangelist, WebEx

Pairing Software as a Service with the right Infrastructure as a Service

Over on ZDNet, Phil Wainewright has an interesting blog post about how SaaS companies should contribute to the SaaS ecosystem by outsourcing their infrastructure. Infrastructure isn't a commodity that is easily replaced by cloud computing, however, especially when it comes to SaaS. The infrastructure WebEx built provides a considerable advantage to our customers in the form of reliability, through the WebEx MediaTone Network.

Phil's post responds to last week's guest blog post on GigaOM by Greg Olson, CTO and founder of Coghead. Greg's post points to the next phase of SaaS, in which next generation SaaS providers rely on infrastructure as a service or cloud computing as part of the go-to-market strategy. WebEx invested considerable resources in building out MediaTone not only to deliver services, but to differentiate from on-premise competitors through greater flexibility and improved reliability. Other SaaS pioneers have made their own differentiated investments in infrastructure for similar reasons. That nascent SaaS companies should want to leverage that experience only makes sense.

Outsourcing infrastructure has considerable benefits for start-ups or companies making initial forays into SaaS. Given the considerable effort required to build an infrastructure capable of delivering applications securely and reliably, these companies should look to established SaaS providers to help deliver their applications. That's why the WebEx MediaTone Network is available to partners looking for a way to deliver their applications in the cloud.

Michael Caton, Collaboration Evangelist, WebEx