Last week it was DoubleClick, this week it’s Marratech. Google has just announced their acquisition of Marratech , developers of web and video conferencing software. Their main competitors would be WebEx (recently acquired by Cisco), Microsoft Live Meeting, and Adobe Connect.
Web conferencing is the newest way to share images, documents, and business plans with a group of people by holding live e-meetings, which is why this purchase makes sense. Google is getting their hand into a little bit of everything so that eventually, people won’t have any reason to go anywhere else but Google for web the web services that they want.
I could see them integrating this into their Google Apps Premier, or even into Google Docs and Spreadsheets. It uses Java, and it’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms which makes it extremely versatile.
Participants of the web and video conferencing are able to see each other with the use of web cameras, and they’re able to record and playback the meetings later on. It would also be great if they made it easy to get the conference up on Google Video in just a few clicks for those who weren’t able to attend.
In their announcement, Google says that this will “enable from-the-desktop participation for Googler’s in video-conference meetings wherever there’s an Internet connection.”
Google also just released their first quarter results and reported revenue of a whopping $3.66 billion! That’s an increase of 63% compared to first quarter of last year, and an increase of 14% compared to 4th quarter of 2006.
Just as their revenue is coming in, it’s going right back out with all of the recent acquisitions. It reminds me of a recent article over at Google Blogoscoped titled “Google Acquires Internet (May 2017).”
It was a mock-up press release where he “quotes” Google CEO Eric Schmidt saying “With the acquisition, we can increase the speed of indexing as everything will already be on our servers by the time it’s published.”
Followed by Larry Page saying, “We realized it’s not very cost-effective to buy the Internet in smaller portions.”
Google seems to be on an acquisition kick, so who’s in queue next?
ooh, ooh me me me. I want to be next. And at a small 10 million I’m a bargain.
Marratech is totally cross-platform on the client and the server side. Marratech runs on OS X, Windows, and Linux and is based on Java. You do have to download a client, but using their java web start you can download the client onto a machine in the background from just clicking on a web link to join an online meeting.
We have been using Marratech for over 4 yeares in a state-wide educational network. I have worked with web and video conferencing for many years and have tested mostly everything. Marratech is a top of the line product and bests WebEX on several levels.
Google has made a good purchase here and I think you will see them leverage this, not only use it internally. Google uses a lot of Tandberg video endpoints and Marratech can connect to these with ease. It is one of the few products that bridges between video H.323 and web conferencing.
You should hold out for a bit…give it a few months and they would be willing to pay $1 billion.
I sure hope that Google takes advantage of this acquisition and doesn’t just put it on the back-burner like they do with so many of their other purchases. At least you have had some experience with Marratech…enough to know that it was smart of them to acquire. I can’t wait to see what they do with the technology now.