Big day for the leading webconferencing company WebEx has finally arrived. Cisco has agreed to acquire WebEx for $3.2 billion, or $57 per share. WebEx, founded in 1995, had posted earnings of $48.6 million on revenue of $380 million in 2006.
As for Cisco, the networking giant has been on acquisition spree for quite sometime now. Recently Cisco had acquired network security provider IronPort for $830 million and social networking startup Five Across for an undisclosed amount. Besides this Cisco has also been working on its own video conferencing product targeted at corporate customers.
This deal should definitely serve as motivation for upstarts in the crowded web-conferencing market that has huge potential to grow outside US. Again an updated list of other players in this space – LiveMeeting, GotoMeeting, Yuuguu, WebDialogs, AdobeConnect, DimDim, Yugma, Vyew, and Qwaq
March 15, 2007 at 12:13 pm |
Anyone help me out with why Webex are worth this much?
March 15, 2007 at 12:23 pm |
‘Cause they have a really huge customer base that includes fortune 500s to SMBs. Other than that Cisco has way too much money.
May 15, 2007 at 1:50 am |
[...] As of now the application is still free with almost no indications anywhere on the site about future changes to this stance. SharedView can be major threat to WebEx and GoToMeeting especially in the SMB market since they don’t really have a free version of their conferencing product to speak off. [...]