Jive Talking - or Jive Meeting

The enterprise online meeting market is crowded. While personal users employ Skype, Facebook Messenger, and numerous other options for personal videoconferencing, there are a number of conferencing options for the enterprise market, including Jive, GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, Open Voice, and Join.me...

...and those are just the options owned (acquired) by a single company, LogMeIn.

The only problem is that none of these tools work together.

That's about to change.

LogMeIn plans to integrate Jive's cloud telephony with GoToMeeting's cloud video conferencing and collaboration. The move to unify the LogMeIn products comes as the vendor chases rivals Zoom and Cisco Webex, which already offer integrated portfolios.

How much are the rival offerings hurting LogMeIn?

GoToMeeting's market share has been hit particularly hard by the rise of Zoom, with anecdotal evidence suggesting that many customers have opted to switch to Zoom as their GoToMeeting licenses have expired, Kerravala said.

And Wall Street has issues.

The company's share value dropped 16.4% after announcing a global leadership restructuring earlier this month and plunged 23% on the day they released third-quarter financial forecasts that fell short of analyst predictions, according to Seeking Alpha.

As an aside, one thing that makes enterprise software tougher is that it has to deal with...enterprises. And enterprises have all sorts of firewall and other security issues to prevent people from using something like meeting software to hijack your system. (The threat is real - one common feature in meeting software is the ability for a user to grant various kinds of control to another user.) As an example, I've been invited to join.me sessions twice, but was unable to join via computer on my corporate network - I had to install join.me on my phone to access the session.

Ah, forget about it - let's just get rid of meeting software altogether, and have everyone move to Silicon Valley and live in million dollar studio apartments.