October 13, 2005

Inside WebEx's new WebExOne - Why not keep the Intranets.com name?

Why did Intranets.com not keep their well known name, Inranets.com?

With the Webex acquisition of Intranets.com less than two months ago, the name of the new Webex division is now Webexone with the products named WebOffice, Meet Me Now and PC Now.

(Read my review of WebOffice here)

This decision, explained Karen Leavitt, VP of Marketing of Webexone was not made lightly. Although Intranets.com was well known by many, the name Intranets.com had the feeling of being only an "intranet", a company's internal portal. However, Intranets.com is so much more and with the new branding the name to more relevant, "weboffice" was best.

Webexone has several basic applications (read my review here) and one can expect many more to come. As more applications are added, Webexone will ask itself when do we build it ourselves (or license the technology as has been done in their email (Critical Path) and synchronization (Puma's Intellisync) software, or partner with another technology provider and co-brand their offering. For example, instead of having the Webexone database, have the database "powered by Quickbase" or FileMaker.

The deciding factor for Webexone will be how well can we integrate the service into our existing offering. Email could be the only "clunky" or weak application for Webexone and like other applications, look for that too be improved over time as well.

Smartonline, is not a collaborative suite like Webexone but looking at these two, and other "software as a service" providers is interesting.

The services have their core suite of integrated services but through software development kits and other programming connections have the ability to link and/or tightly integrate other applications to their service.

Smartonline's model is to co-brand its suite of applications, forms and business information with other brands like Inc Magazine, Business Week and New York Enterprise Report (which I regularly contribute to).

As I was reviewing Weboffice, tools like blogging, email newsletter management and other powerful solutions came to my mind as tools that Weboffice could add to its feature set either as a fully integrated offering or semi-integrated by having simple links to these services (hopefully with one logon for all applications).

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