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April 26, 2006

Review by Network Computing

Network Computing published an article focusing on online collaboration for education.

The article focuses on the major market players and hosting vs inhouse solutions.

A couple of great things:

1. Marratech being compared to Microsoft, Adobe, Webex and all the others is a tremendous achievement. A small company from the north of Sweden is able to take on the biggest, and beat a bunch of them on the way!

2. Here is a direct quote from the article: "In fact, in our evaluations of audio and video quality, Marratech led the pack." This means that if you want to interact with voice and video, look no further :-)

3. Another direct quote from the article: "Like Breeze and e/pop, Marratech offers multiparty video, but its was the most stable and robust." Crashing during collaboration is just no fun.


Where we need to work some more:

1. "Some of the biggest limitations of Marratech come in its participant-interaction functionality. There is no discussion control and only limited differentiation between user roles. We would prefer not to have to determine roles of participants in advance."

Our moderator function was introduced recently, in January, just in time for the article. Next week's server release improves on the moderator functionality greatly and we will continue to work on this, seeing how important it is.

I guess this is how we have done it for the past 9 years. Put out a new feature, keeping it basic and stable and then improve it with the help of customer feedback.


Conclusion

The best quote was however this:

"<...>the small and medium-size simultaneous group meetings, Marratech performed best, followed by Breeze and Centra. The ability to have good quality audio and video with multiple speakers and video windows was key here."

that quote, combined with:

"<..>If cross-platform functionality is vital, or you prefer an in-house system, go with Marratech or Elluminate."

...says it all!

A well deserved B with some very powerful arguments for video and audio quality, powerpoint clarity and cross platform. The article also gives us insight on what to focus on in the near future: user control and management.

Combine our strenghts mentionned in the article with H.323 compatibility, our API, dialing out to phones with SIP, our heavy duty security, server cluster support and IP Multicast (things not mentionned in the article) and you have a winner... in my eyes :-)

Hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did!

/Serge

Posted by Serge Lachapelle at 11:11 AM | Comments (1)

April 19, 2006

Real, online customer evaluation

When looking at the Kolabora News radar, I found this great, no holds barred, no marketing BS evaluation done from our users at Kan-Ed.

It is available here:

http://www.kan-ed.org/marratech/report.html

A few months outdated, since it is missing H.323 and H.264, but a good read nonetheless.

Posted by Serge Lachapelle at 09:15 AM | Comments (0)

April 07, 2006

Live presentation from a happy customer

One of our customers, Network Appliance, did a demo at APBM 2006 in Boston using their Marratech server.

Deborah Rousseau, Technical Briefing Program Manager at Network Appliance, Inc. used Marratech with the UK and Stockholm (with our own co-founder Magnus Hedberg) live to discuss how technology was being used in NetApp's environment and it's impact on their briefing programs.

Congratulations Deborah on a great demo!

Posted by Serge Lachapelle at 04:09 PM | Comments (0)

April 03, 2006

Marratech used for Teleworking and Disaster Relief

Great article looking at the way Marratech can be used in Teleworking and as a tool for disasater relief.

Getting such an article in your ibox is a nice way to start a week!

http://www.fcw.com/article92789-04-03-06-Print

Posted by Serge Lachapelle at 08:31 AM | Comments (0)