Microsoft has agreed to acquire PlaceWare, a privately held company
that provides Web conferencing services for businesses.
Microsoft will use the acquisition to start the Real Time
Collaboration Group - a business unit - which will develop products
and technologies allowing workers collaborate in real time over the
internet. The unit will be part of Microsoft's Information Worker
group, which makes the Office applications suite.
The transaction is expected to close in the next few months.
Financial terms and other details have not been disclosed.
PlaceWare offers services that let businesses conduct real-time,
interactive presentations and meetings over the internet. Its
customers include American Express, Johnson & Johnson and Cisco
Systems.
Microsoft will combine PlaceWare's assets with some of its own to
develop online conferencing technologies. It will share some of
them with industry partners, allowing them to build custom business
offerings that use real-time collaboration capabilities. The goal
is to boost the productivity of what Microsoft calleds "information
workers".
Giga Information Group analyst Rob Enderle characterised the
technology behind PlaceWare's service as "the big brother to
NetMeeting", Microsoft's existing online collaboration software
offered with Windows 2000.
While NetMeeting only works well for groups of five or six people,
PlaceWare's software can scale up to support hundreds or even
thousands of users.
PlaceWare's competitors include WebEx Communications, which is
larger than PlaceWare, because it managed to attract greater levels
of investment. WebEx will now face "a much greater level of
competition" in the form of Microsoft, Enderle said.