Google Acquires Marratech; Gets Into WebEx Territory

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1. Andrew
   

   April 20th, 2007 at 3:20 am

   I really hope that Marratech’s product has improved in the last couple of years. We tried it in 2005 and it was very very slow and choppy. I hope Google didn’t buy a lemon — is anyone using it currently who can comment on if it’s any good?

2. Gore
   

   April 20th, 2007 at 3:26 am

   Microsoft better buy aveComm( http://www.avecomm.com ) before some one else does…

3. Stefan Hess
   

   April 20th, 2007 at 3:29 am

   Nice move: Why not using this as “Google Talk Pro”?

4. Inspector Gadget
   

   April 20th, 2007 at 3:33 am

   Go Go Gadget Google

5. StartUpCrunch
   

   April 20th, 2007 at 3:44 am

   spend spend spend

6. Vijay Chakravarthy
   

   April 20th, 2007 at 5:37 am

   It will be a lot of fun to see them retrofitting this on top of the jingle API (I dont think thats trivial, but their core strength is engineering anyways).
   From a current portfolio perspective, this doesnt make any sense, why not just do a simple h.263 implementation to complement google talk (rebrand as toogle? :))
   Although, some of the possibilities of integration with sketchup, and google earth are pretty cool…I’m putting this into the wait and see category.

7. Doug
   

   April 20th, 2007 at 5:47 am

   WebEx requires ActiveX controls so it isn’t entirely browser based.

8. Jengis Khan
   

   April 20th, 2007 at 6:20 am

   Someone also should look into buying a company like Medianet Innovations. http://www.medianetinnovations.com.

   They do some of the same things as Marratech, and the software is a DL as well.

   JK

9. pallet jack
   

   April 20th, 2007 at 6:31 am

   so far 2/8 posts are trying to sell other companies heh to Google competitors.

   - While they do it; I will to. Microsoft! Yahoo! (what the heck) Google to !

   Buy some pallet jacks / http://www.Bishamon-Pallet-Jack.com

10. bdb
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 6:54 am

    Where are the negative comments? I’ve recently come to expect negativity surrounding any Google-related post. C’mon yall, tell us who they are copying now and why they are evil. Help me justify my hatred of this company folks!

11. David
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 7:06 am

    Interesting. We use marratech rather heavily, and the product has been pretty solid. I’m not sure what Andrew considers choppy - given bandwidth in the US, I’m not exactly expecting HD video when I go online. It’ll be very interesting to see the way this product gets integrated. It’s also nice that it’s a mac-ready product.

12. Andrew
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 7:12 am

    Marratech is a rock solid product, they basically use the same sound engine as Skype and the collaboration pieces are really good IMHO. I always recommend them over WebEx. I agree with Stefan, this will be Google Talk Pro, but just awesome if they give it away !!

13. parmgrewal
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 7:24 am

    google is on shopping spree these days . I was just wondering if they can buy my blog.I dont mind if they bargain.

14. Amanda
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 7:39 am

    they really are on a shopping spree I wonder what they are going to buy next? disneyland??

    they should make GOOGLE LAND

15. nomadicalloy
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 7:49 am

    more free google apps coming soon.

16. Colin Dowling
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 7:55 am

    Why doesn’t Google buy SalesForce? Seriously, that would get the “web as space for all your apps” ball rolling much faster for them.

17. Russell Winslow
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 7:56 am

    I don’t know why everyone shakes their head when you have to download software. Personally, I’d rather download a 31 MB app then use a slow browser application thats probably going to freeze my computer. Sorry guys but I still don’t think the browser is there yet, there is still room for desktop apps.

18. mikec
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 8:04 am

    Thinking this is the first direct challenge to WebEx is a mistake, that started with Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Presentations definitely drove it home. Those services are just app sharing delivered in a slightly different way.

    My question here is, can Google support this as a business class application. It’s one thing to share documents and deliver IM, since expectations of performance might not be high, people can tolerate some delay. Delivering video and voice, raises the bar considerably, and increases load on their network. If it’s going to work, it has to work reasonably well and Google has to be prepared to handle the extra bandwidth.

19. David Haddad
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 8:24 am

    Go Sweden! Another Swedish company acquired by big G. Recently, Hans Rosling’s data visualisation startup (based here in Stockholm) was also acquired.

20. Dan
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 9:00 am

    Good, maybe they will crush Webex - Cisco. Webex is so complicated and clunky that is will be nice to make them work a little.

21. Stephen
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 9:03 am

    We use Marratech in a state-wide network for over 4 years. Marratech is solid, cross platform (client and server) and we have many happy customers. Marratech has many advantages over WebEX. In my opinion Google made a good decision with this purchase. I have used most all web conferencing apps out there and Marratech is at the top.

22. good
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 9:05 am

    myspace profiles are down????

    Sorry, we couldn’t find http://delb2.myspace.com/html.ng/site.

23. Sergio
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 9:11 am

    VoIP?! No worries.. Verizon will sue them too!

24. Gal Josefsberg
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 9:27 am

    I’m not sure this is a part of some “enterprise” ambition. If you’ve looked at Google docs, it’s certainly not an “enterprise” solution. It’s a great solution for an individual consumer with a limited budget (like me) but not something I would use at work.

    I’ve never used this company’s software, but maybe Google is just focusing on serving their core user (individual consumers) better. Remember, they make most of their money off of ads. Buying software for businesses doesn’t help you serve more ads.

    GJ
    http://www.60in3.com

25. Jonathan Duong
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 9:37 am

    GoToMeeting is by far the best solution I’ve used in this space. In the 2 years since I started using it, I’ve run hundreds of meetings and only had one person not be able to log-in to a meeting. I tried WebEx for 2 weeks, and about 1/3 of my clients could not get into my meeting. I also found WebEx to be extremely slow on its feet.

26. David
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 10:04 am

    Funny how Google’s corporate mission that once was “to organize the world’s information” has turned into “think of us as advertising platform”.

    Businesses are willing to pay for web-apps that get the job done, but there’s only so many text-ads busy managers can handle.

    I’m confident Google will make this acquisition work, probably to the benefit of small/medium sized businesses.

27. KR
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 10:23 am

    I think Gal (24) has an excellent comment. The conversation is primariy around Marratech versus WebEx. The other thought is Cisco versus Google. Very different models and revenue streams. Cisco dominates IT centers and enterprise solutions. Google dominates the web and consumer/advertising. I see Google going after the mainstream (competing with Microsoft) more than WebEx (Cisco).

    Google’s primary objectives have been to obliterate Microsoft and outperform Yahoo! I don’t see them losing focus by going after the enterprise players (Cisco, IBM, SAP). They are having too much fun eating that Redmond, WA company’s lunch.

28. ajadoniz
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 10:44 am

    money makes you itchy

29. SteveH
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 10:52 am

    Random thoughts:

    - “…I’d rather download a 31 MB app then use a slow browser application thats probably going to freeze my computer. ..” -> Naah - I’ll take the 9mb app that doesn’t need a computer whose OS still doesn’t work.

    - Apple should buy Google, since the two companies have the best search engines bar none (Apple has Spotlight.) Also, Jeff Han’s multi-touch UI that Apple bought for the iPhone is always demo’ed with Google Maps.

    - “Go Sweden…” - Yes, Ericsson just bought Tandberg Television also…

30. Alaska Miller
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 11:07 am

    Shouldn’t discount webex out. A big secret project they’ve been working on for the past couple months is to extend and open their API to build a similar website like Salesforce’s AppExchange and cozying up more and more with Salesforce for integration. You want web conference for your small to medium to even maybe corporate organization? You’re going for webex’s solution.

    The only thing that Google can possibly do is make a webex clone for free and entice people, but where’s the fun in that for a corporate IT director?

31. Darren Stuart
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 11:11 am

    you forgot sketchup as one of their desktop apps.

    I think they are more likely to be going after the skype market than the enterprise one.

32. eas
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 11:24 am

    I note that you don’t say they are going into LiveMeeting territory. HA HA.

33. anthropocentric
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 11:41 am

    Why hasn’t Fog Creek Software (Joel Spolsky’s company) turned it’s CoPilot product into a meeting product yet?

    It should follow in the footsteps of Gotomypc and launch a Gotomeeting equivalent.

34. Eric
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 12:07 pm

    There’s lots of interesting things they can do with this, and it fits in well with their other collaborative productivity offerings…

    Though now I fear that my beloved Google Talk is going to lose even more of the minimalism that I love about it…

35. Anders Fredriksson
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 12:18 pm

    Just to be clear… The company was not acquired, but their software was.

36. ZeEdiot
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 12:32 pm

    Swedish start-up?
    To my knowledge, Marratech started developing its technology platform back in 1995…. Sounds like a pretty grown-up start-up to me…

    Having tested a variety of different collaborative solutions, including Marratechs, I would have preferred Google buying San Diego-based WiredRed. Their solutions kick serious b*tt!

37. Herb Levitin
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 1:29 pm

    Google most likely paid way too much for some obsolete software just as Cisco did with WebEx. The next generation Web 2.0 software from Persony is Flash based, does not require any software downloads by attendees and works through any firewall.

38. RaJesh Anandakrishnan
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 3:35 pm

    This is also another cool move from Google. Google lack video conferencing and voip. Now another addon to Google Bundle.

    http://www.suggestusability.com

39. David Mackey
    

    April 20th, 2007 at 8:01 pm

    I’ve been using CrossLoop, but this is an exciting development, along with Cisco’s acquiring of WebEx. Hopefully it will push prices down in this area, as right now the prices aren’t exactly low - especially from major vendors like Citrix and WebEx.

40. Jojo
    

    April 21st, 2007 at 12:36 am

    WebEx sucks big time. The UI is like from 1995, it always requires some sort of update whenever I use it and it can’t handle screen translation very well. I run 1600X1200 and always have to kick down my resolution when doing a dog & pony because WebEx apparently can’t display the whole screen to people running at lower resolutions.

    As to Google buying Salesforce.com, puh-leeze. Salesforce also sucks big time. The only people who thing salesforce is any good are clueless executives and bystanders who don’t really use a CRM on a daily basis. And what passes for support on salesforce.com is near the bottom of the barrel. A much better choice for a browser based CRM is sugarcrm.com, which is free open source or 1/3 the cost of salesforce for a hosted model.

41. Ted
    

    April 21st, 2007 at 4:48 am

    Is Google planning to offer this service for free? (like Google Analytics) … Or does anyone know if they are going to charge for this service?

    If this thing does what its supposed to do it could be quite useful.

42. a
    

    April 21st, 2007 at 7:00 am

    tushar gianchandani

    I know you don’t like to forward mails. I am really sorry to bother you. If you have a heart and like to help a family, please forward this mail. Every time you forward this it will add 5 cents per email ID to AOL and they will deposit it into my bank account. Which will help me save my husband

43. Free Web Meeting
    

    April 21st, 2007 at 7:13 am

    Web Meeting Space is really catching Up.

    Try our product. It is free for web meetings.

44. bdb
    

    April 21st, 2007 at 7:47 am

    Nice spyware product, dude.

    This acquisition seems more likely to be a part of “Enterprise”. We’ll see if there’s some add supported free version…

45. Dave the Rave
    

    April 21st, 2007 at 12:10 pm

    Jojo #40 - I use Webex and Salesforce extensively on a daily basis.
    Webex is clunky as anything, but basically usable for sharing presentations. Voice is a definite no-no, especially with international calls.

    Salesforce is fantastic, we have one of the biggest Salesforce integrations at our company and use everything from Reports and Dashboards to run our business and heavy web service integration plumbed in to all aspects of the company’s IT.

    Either come out as an astroturfing SugarCRM marketing bod or explain why you think you have more of a clue about CRM?

46. Jason Kester
    

    April 21st, 2007 at 5:38 pm

    Hmm. Too bad we didn’t launch Twiddla a month ago.

    It’s curious to see all these companies doing the same application, using the same technology. It will be interesting to see if it can be done without the plugins that all these companies are using. “WebEx for the Web” would be quite a thing to see.

47. Jojo
    

    April 21st, 2007 at 10:16 pm

    45. Dave the Rave - Ha, ha, ha!

    If you think salesforce is “fantastic”, then you can’t be using it on a daily basis and probably don’t have very much experience using a CRM. I HAVE used SF extensively and in fact, I was the SF administrator plus the heaviest user in the last company I was at. I also used it a few years ago and all of the problems I reported at that time still weren’t fixed when I came back to it last time. I’ve also tested Sugar, so I have a basis of comparison. Have you? I don’t think so. So the real question is: Are you a shill for SF?

    Superficially, SF looks nice. And compared to outdated junk CRM’s like Goldmine and ACT, it is much better. However, the UI is awful, inconsistent and not user friendly. Parts of SF seem to have been written by different groups and don’t sort the same, behave the same or have the same config abilities.

    Here’s a list of “some” problems. If you are a heavy user, then you’ll recognize these. If not, then again, you really can’t be using SF very heavily. If you’re like most, then your system is probably not configured effectively and you likely don’t work very efficiently.

    - SF does most everything in a single browser window, so you lose your place often. The way to make SF behave better is to use 2 open browser windows and drag links between them. For instance, keep your activities list in one window and drag an account name to the other window. That way you don’t have to keep on going back and forth to rebuild the activity window. This speeds up your work. They should use more pop-up windows and and add AJAX support.

    - But If you have multiple SF windows open, SF doesn’t understand this and times EACH AND EVERY open SF window as a separate process, rather than recognizing that each window is part of the same parent process. So if you are active in one SF window and the
    other SF windows are in the background, you will issue timeout popups for those background windows. Annoying.

    - So you like dashboards? Me too. BUT you can’t export a dashboard. All you can do is take a screenshot.

    - Have you noticed that dashboards don’t refresh automatically? Have you ever shown someone a dashboard, discussing the details and then realized you were looking at old data because you forgot to click the “refresh now” button. This is the SF explanation:

    “The Dashboard queue is designed to smooth the load on our servers. If a dashboard is refreshed, up to 20 reports have to be refreshed to build the dashboard. To process 20 reports from one user in the same millisecond would be too much load on the system, so we use a queue to smooth out the number of items that can be processed at the same time. Today, that limit on the number of items is 10. The busiest times are mid-morning and mid-afternoon EST.

    The Dashboard queue is shared across all users, just as the rest of the system is shared across all users. Dashboard jobs are added today in the order they arrive. At busy times, your requests may be queued behind others.”

    - Have you tried to modify the Contact display section under Accounts? Did you notice that the NAME field HAS to go first and this can’t be changed? Did you discover that there is a maximum of 10 fields that you can include in this display? Have you noticed that these fields all have minimum lengths and you can’t shrink them to the size YOU want?

    - Have you discovered that SF doesn’t support “time zones” for contacts (useful in sales when you have a large territory crossing time zones)? I built an artificial construct for this. Boggles my mind that no one in SF development thought of this functionality in the 6-7 years they have been in business.

    - How about graphs in reports? You can export a report to Excel BUT any graphs shown with the report are not exported,/recreated in Excel. So you have to go do this manually.

    - Ever run a report and run into the artificial 2000 record limit? SF truncates the on-screen report after that. If you want the all the data, you have to export to Excel to get it. SF WILL NOT display additional data itself. Why not give the user control over this number? Because SF is afraid of swamping their servers!

    - SF allows a user to save a report with the exact same name as an existing report. This practice makes it impossible to identify which report came first or might be a new version of an old report. SF does not ask the user if they want to replace the existing report.

    - SF only supports 2 column pages.

    - If you click the back button in SF, you are always returned to the top of the page, not where you were on the page previously.

    - In field customization, when any one entry value in a picklist field is modified, SF marks ALL picklist values as having been modified. This is a serious problem as you lose all accountability as to when a value was modified and by whom.

    - In field customization again, I wanted to get a list of all active SF users in a drop down. Not possible.

    - - On Home Page (inside Activities to do) - The person’s name displays as “last, first”. Similar problem on ACCOUNT Page that contains more than 6 contacts. When you view the contacts as part of the whole account page, names appear as “First, Last”. But if you click the “View More” link, the name display changes to “Last, First”!

    - SF doesn’t show a modification trail on an account level (something like they do in Opportunities). So there is no way to effectively track changes to account ownership nor WHAT was changed on an account level at any time in the past. This is a serious security hole.

    - SF only supports flat text in activity comments, not rich text. This is very restrictive and doesn’t allow you to highlight information.

    - There isn’t any built-in spell checker for use in logging activities. So you’ll often run into difficult to read activity histories because people don’t know how to spell.

    - Go to a note in Notes & Attachments. When you EDIT the note, you’ll see spacing tabs. When you VIEW the note, you won’t.

    In administration reports looking at a users logon report, you can see the logon times but you can’t see or get the logoff times.

    - When using VIEW ALL button to look at history, I often needed to clean something up in one of the displayed entries (eliminate blank lines due to faulty SF conversion of HTML to text email, fix spelling, etc.). But there is no link back to a specific entry in SF. You have to try and guess where in the View All chain you are, close the view, then go search for what I think is the right entry in the history to change.

    - Ever transfer an account to someone else? Did you notice that the owner filed in the contact records is not updated with the new owner? If you move accounts around frequently or have a lot of turn-over, you’ll have contacts owned by people who are no longer at the company.

    - Security levels and access in SF is one big mish-mash. It’s virtually impossible to build an understandable security schema in SF.

    - Working with support is a trial. If you send an email, they almost always truncate what you wrote and just add their reply. This causes loss of thread continuity. If you open a case, they sometimes reply to the case (but you don’t get an auto notice that they have replied) or they will reply via email and not update the case.

    - Turn-around time for basic support is 2 business days (and sometimes they actually reply in that time frame). This is too long a time in any case. You’re already paying them for the product on a per user/year basis. And most of the time, their replies are useless anyway (”if you’d like to add this ‘deficiency” to our wish list, go here” crap). Want “Premium Support”? That starts at $8,000/year additional.

    - Last I checked, SF had 3 levels of service. The “limited “free” version for up to 5 users, the PRO version for $750/user/year and the Enterprise version for $1500/user/year. The PRO version doesn’t include certain functionality, like marketing. You have to buy the Enterprise version for that. With SugarCRM, you pay about ~$450/user/year for the whole kit and caboodle, about 1/3 the cost of SF. It’s a no-brainer. So by definition, those who have chosen SF, like yourself, must clearly be lacking a brain. Or maybe your company just has money to throw away?

48. Johan
    

    April 22nd, 2007 at 12:11 am

    This article (in swedish) suggests that Google payed 100m swedish kronor (about $15m) for Marratech

    http://di.se/Index/Nyheter/200.....?src=xlink

    A bargain I think

49. Mike @ Emerging Earth
    

    April 22nd, 2007 at 12:42 am

    This could give Google Talk the capabilities needed to compete with Skype.

50. Mike @ Emerging Earth
    

    April 22nd, 2007 at 4:23 am

    Marratech video demo here.

51. Dave the Rave
    

    April 22nd, 2007 at 6:12 am

    Jojo @47

    ———————-
    If you think salesforce is “fantastic”, then you can’t be using it on a daily basis and probably don’t have very much experience using a CRM. I HAVE used SF extensively and in fact, I was the SF administrator plus the heaviest user in the last company.
    ———————-

    I am a SF administrator and one of the heaviest users in the company. You can laugh all you like, but you’re the one who’s spend your precious time over the weekend copy pasting from your company’s marketing literature onto blog forums

    I also seem to remember that when we chose SF 3 years ago, Sugar wasn’t ready, we weren’t missing anything. Still you go ahead getting pissed with the minutiae - everything you brought up doesn’t bother us enough.

    Thanks for your entertaining and informative reply, now go have a beer.

52. developer
    

    April 22nd, 2007 at 8:48 am

    Never heard of marratech. Also I wonder why google with its army of excellent top notch engineers couldn’t have created a better or similar product themselves ?

53. Lior
    

    April 22nd, 2007 at 10:00 am

    dosn’t make sense.

    I’m scratching my head. this is really a low-tec comapny, I’ev looked at them before…

    maybe they ahve some kind of IP?

54. Lior
    

    April 22nd, 2007 at 10:01 am

    sorry for the typos

55. Jojo
    

    April 22nd, 2007 at 8:07 pm

    51. Dave the Rave - Last post for me on this subject. You really are a “raving” lunatic. You keep alluding to me having some sort of relationship with Sugar. One more time - I don’t have any ties to them whatsoever. How about telling us what company you work for? I’d like to send this thread to your CEO. Maybe he has more sense than you exhibit.

56. David Richardson
    

    April 22nd, 2007 at 9:43 pm

    I’m also a long-time user of Marratech (it’s more or less the standard desktop videoconferencing app within higher education in Sweden). I’ve also tried several of the alternatives, including Flash-based apps … but they just don’t work as well - and often don’t work at all. I’m not surprised Google was interested - and I bet they knew a lot about the alternatives on offer too.

    One of Marratech’s main strengths is the whiteboard. It’s clean, easy to use, and works fine, even when one of the participants is coming in over a telephone modem from Abu Dhabi that won’t even support voice, let alone video! When you use Marratech on the type of network it’s designed for (i.e. at least ADSL), it’s a world-beating product.

    I’m really pleased about this news - now there’s an even better chance that Marratech will continue to develop and grow, even it changes its name.

57. Casey Edwinson
    

    April 23rd, 2007 at 6:45 am

    I tried this product as for a competitive comparison a few months ago and it was a dog. Nothing to do with the fact they are a competitor to my organization other than it was laggy and crashed a few times. WebEx and Mix Meeting much better

58. Joe
    

    May 1st, 2007 at 7:08 am

    Hmmm… First Google creates a suite of Office applications, and now a Webex-like conferencing tool. This looks like they are after a very complete all-in-one “business solution” package… Look for an acquisition of a web-based project management company in the near future.

    —
    We Will Create Your Very Own Domain Name - http://PowerNamer.com

59. Peter Stewart
    

    May 4th, 2007 at 6:41 pm

    There are over 100 web conferencing solutions in the market. 95% of the market share is owned by Microsoft, WebEx, Adobe, IBM, and Netspoke. Marratech is a relative unknown in this market with little market share and a very small base of users. My guess is that Google is going to completely rebuild this application.