Hot Vendors in Webinars, 2015
Author: David Mario Smith Date: May 27, 2015
Topic: Collaboration Research Note Number: 2015-19
Issue: Who are the Collaboration providers and how will they evolve?
Summary: Webinar and webcasting tools are required for internal and external communication in areas such as HR and marketing. These Hot Vendors offer alternatives to existing webinar providers.
In the web conferencing space, webinars and webcasts are a popular use case and meeting type, used for internal training and by sales and marketing professionals to interact with prospects and customers. Most of the major web conferencing vendors have modules and facilities to accommodate larger webinar events. There are also specialists like ON24 that directly support large webinar and webcasting events. However, a new breed of provider is challenging the established players with new pricing and licensing options using a freemium model. In this research note, we discuss a few of the emerging Hot Vendors in this space.
Traditionally webinar offerings are predominantly cloud-based and can be sold per event for large one-time events or as a subscription. We believe there is downward price pressure in this market and the entire web conferencing space, as free and low cost providers are constantly emerging with “good enough” feature sets. These providers are using the freemium to premium model and packing lots of features that usually come with a higher price.