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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 April 26, 2006 11:11 AM
Comments
Serge - I enjoyed this too. They got some things wrong confusing "Time-to-Meet" with "MeetNow" and thinking that a client is not needed however. The positive thing is that Marratech was mentioned in the league of larger and more well-known players....and that critical comments were indeed informative... the first past at moderation..definitely did need some work. Congrats.
Art
Posted by: Art Johnson at April 27, 2006 02:43 AM