As companies everywhere reduce their travel budgets in order to reduce costs, the conferencing market – including audio, Web and video conferencing services that facilitate “live” meetings with partners, customers and prospects – has seen major growth.

Helping to accelerate adoption of conferencing services are events such as the recent global outbreak of swine flu – which has caused many companies to reconsider their travel plans – and in some cases civil unrest in specific regions, such as the drug cartel violence occurring along the Mexico-U.S. border. In fact, myriad factors are causing companies to reconsider their travel plans.

Companies are also gravitating to conferencing services because they help boost employee productivity, improve collaboration and reduce communications costs. Very often, after a company adopts a conferencing solution, management will quickly come to recognize the benefits and will actually expand deployment across the organization.

 

What’s more, there has been a flood of new entrants in the conferencing services market in recent years, and increasing competition has led to a flattening of pricing. Many of these providers are trying to “outdo” each other in terms of the feature sets and capabilities that their platforms deliver. In addition, the advent of fully Web-based or Software-as-a-Service, or “SaaS (News - Alert)”-based offerings has enabled faster and easier consumption of these solutions. These factors have combined to result in increased interest and uptake from businesses seeking to adopt conferencing in order to cut costs and improve processes.

Considering all of this, one might be led to believe that the conferencing “market pie” is large enough so that every service provider and vendor can get a slice. But, based on some recent events, it appears the market is reaching a certain level of, shall we say, “saturation.”

One indication of this might be the reported demise of Web conferencing services provider Yugma (News - Alert). According to a press release issued by Publicare, which operates the vendor-independent portal www.Webconferencing-test.com, Yugma is about to go out of business and has been removed from the portal’s ranking list, which ranks the Web conferencing service providers based on quality of service, price, features and other criteria.

 

According to the release, Publicare received a copy of a letter sent by Yugma CEO and founder Lingaraj Mishra, dated June 2, announcing the company’s planned closure.

“On May 26, 2009, the remaining members of the board of directors convened and determined that it is advisable to wind down the business affairs of the company,” Mishra wrote in the letter.

Meanwhile the Yugma Web site is up and running and there is no indication the company is about to go under.

In a blog post yesterday on the Webinar Success Conference Blog, company president Ken Molay casts some doubt on whether Yugma is really going out of business:

“I called Lingaraj at Yugma’s offices,” Molay wrote in his post. “He says he is going crazy answering phone calls and dealing with the false story of the demise of the company.”

“Mishra says that while there were definitely financial difficulties and management discussions of how to handle operations, the company and the product are both ongoing concerns,” Molay wrote. “He wouldn’t go into details of the internal situation (Yugma is a privately held company and does not have to expose financial or operational data), but made reference to the fact that the board had brought in an interim CEO who was there for one year, leaving in April of this year. Mishra is back in charge now and is working on stabilizing financing and ownership concerns.”

Accompanying the post is a copy of the letter which Mishra purportedly sent to stockholders, and also to Publicare, on June 2. In it he says the state of the company “has become worse, with current liabilities significantly exceeding current assets, and projected June cash outflows are in excess of cash balances and cash inflows.” He goes on to explain that the company has tried to get financing, but thus far has been unable to do so. As a result, the company may have to either file for bankruptcy or shut down completely, he said.

Previously, Yugma’s software had been ranked third on Webconferencing-test.com’s listing – being awarded nine out of a maximum 10 points.

Meanwhile, conferencing services provider Netviewer has moved up two positions on the list, this following the release of its new Meet 5 offering.

Launched in November 2006, Webconferencing-test.com aims to provide a vendor-independent appraisal of online meeting tools for small and mid-sized enterprises and freelancers. The portal compares the functional scope of over 20 solutions and assesses how well they meet real-world needs. Analysis is based on key user requirements such as ease-of-use, security and cost.

As far as the fate of Yugma goes, it looks like we’ll just have to keep a close eye on the situation and see how it plays out…

 

Yugma made news on TMCnet in February when it announced a new version of its service that allows Skype users to instantly and easily host or attend online meetings, share their desktop and fully collaborate with multiple users. The Yugma SE (Skype (News - Alert) Edition) Skype Extra desktop sharing and Web collaboration module allows users to register and log in to the Yugma instant Web conferencing service using their Skype name. The new version supports both Windows and Mac versions of Skype.