WebProNews

Online meeting company gets purchased by another online meeting company for $45 million USD.

With enterprises flung out over several states, or even countries, getting people into one room for a quick meeting can be a difficult and expensive exercise in frustration. High-end video conferencing in real-time tends to be restricted to the highest levels of corporate management.

WebEx has offered a set of online meeting and support tools for a few years now, and gains the various asynchronous tools offered by privately held Intranets.com with this acquisition, according to a press release.

Intranets.com offers secure document sharing, group scheduling, and discussion forums among its toolset. Database applications and task management options could be found there as well, for businesses that would not or could not pay enterprise-level software prices.

"Companies of all sizes are realizing the cost and productivity benefits of on-demand solutions. WebEx is uniquely positioned to provide a new generation of web collaboration solutions that are affordable, easy-to-use and can be deployed immediately." said Subrah Iyar, CEO of WebEx, in the release.

This writer has used both applications in the past, WebEx much more recently than Intranets.com, and found both effective at facilitating their areas of focus. Being able to diagnose a salesman's remote laptop issue over several hundred miles with WebEx, or collaborate with a freelance copywriter on web site contents, proved easy to accomplish.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.