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June 30, 2005

Marratech Free - Flashback

Hi,

I would just like to write a blog entry on the reasoning behind Marratech Free, since it is of great importance for us.

1. Product accessibility

There are a few things in the web conferencing industry that I feel needs to change. What better way than to change yourself first?

There is a clash between internet culture and web conferencing providers.

Internet savvy users want to try software without contacting a sales agent first. This is true of people at home, IT departments doing evaluations and university users.

Web Conferencing tools are often sold as complex solutions and in a way that is reminiscent of video conferencing systems. High prices, complex setup (ISDN for breakfast anyone), etc...

I believe that the future lies in quick, small and nimble systems. Free is our first step towards making it simpler to use and test, more changes at Marratech are to come.

With Marratech Free, we want people to be able to try our solution out and use it without having to have to go through aggressive sales tactics.

If you try Marratech Free and you like it, great! If you like Marratech Free, but would like encryption, SIP / H.323 bridging, Multicast and all the functionality, contact us! Our resellers include very devoted and talented people that will help you in that step.

2. Competition

There are many free solutions out there. Some of these are "alternative" solutions as they do not come from traditional web conf / video conf providers.

iChat, Skype (both with up to five for video and audio) MSN Messenger, etc... These tools are all seeing wider and wider acceptance, and are slowly moving into the corporate space.

While each of these tools have clear usage scanerios and benefits, we believe that our Marratech Free will fit into many new, unthought of usage scenarios that will open doors to widespread usage.

Instead of letting those competitors creep up on us some more, we decide to not hide our product behind complex sales processes and push it as a great alternative. Cut the chat :-)

3. Product comparisons

During purchase decisions and when analysts do a table comparison that includes our software I always get the nagging feeling that the truth is not coming through.

For instance, there may be a check box for VOIP... but does it really work? Does it have higher than telephone quality? Does it have very low delays in the audio? We have tested a well known solution just last week (Brrrrrr....) and after a 20 minute meeting I had over 5 seconds of delay in our conversation. ( I have a dedicated 100 mbps internet connection BTW)

Another example is multi platform support. Some compared solutions may say they have multi platform support, when the truth is that only a subset of the functionality is available.

Marratech Free will enable people that are doing these evaluations to do much more indepth comparisons, instead of looking at pages full of check marks that may hide the truth.

I do note dare say our solution is perfect (it isn't, and if you want something fixed or improved, tell us!) and I hope this does not come off as arrogant... but these grids have been somewhat frustrating.

4. Quality Assurance

This one is kind of easy to explain. The more users we have, the more feedback we get, the higher the product quality we can achieve.

5. Marketing

This is probably the most important one. Marratech is not a known name. Throwing huge amounts of money in marketing is not possible for our company. We do not have the time to grow this by word of mouth, as the market is moving fast. By using the internet as our platform, and using Marratech Free as a tool for this, we hope to reach more people than ever before.

Well, I hope these ramblings explain a little bit more the thinking behind our Marratech Free initiative.

Posted by Serge Lachapelle at June 30, 2005 02:22 PM

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Comments

Does Free require a server? I'm confused about how to use it. My coworkers and I want to try it out but don't have access to put anything on the server. We read about it in THE Journal's enews.

Posted by: Ouida Myers at July 28, 2005 11:09 PM

No, it does not require a server. But if you run it on the same machine as the client, be sure that it is recent enough so that it can handle both. Check out our user forum if you have questions!

Posted by: Serge Lachapelle at August 8, 2005 04:23 PM