March - 2009 issue > Cover Story

By Jaya Smitha Menon

Today Desiree depends on Yugma for its interactions with clients and teams because it is an easy to use application that allows people to join a Webinar and see what is being presented on his or her desktop. In addition to hosting Webinars, Bella uses Yugma to teach clients how to use their e-commerce software. This allows its clients to easily participate from their own computers in their offices or homes at their convenience. Training sessions can be either pre-planned or instantaneous with this service.

Yugma was founded by Lingaraj Mishra in 2005 in Minneapolis, MN, and launched in mid 2007. With offices in Minneapolis, New Delhi, and Silicon Valley, Yugma today has over 260,000 registered users, with approximately 50,000 conducted meetings per month, with 25-minute average meeting times. Currently, they also have over 2,000 paying subscribers of all sizes (large enterprises, SMB, SOHO). The company launched the product at a time when the demand for high quality, easy to use Web collaboration and screen sharing was growing significantly. Unlike the majority of other technology products and services, Web conferencing is one bright spot where the current economic situation has resulted in increased demand. "The macro-economic factors of the global slowdown, higher travel and energy costs, and consumer adoption of green technologies are heavily weighted in favor of exponential growth of the market for Web conferencing and unified collaboration solutions," says Vas Bhandarkar, CEO of Yugma.

The Yugma edge
The Web conferencing market is a very competitive one with large companies like Webex, Microsoft, and Citrix offering Web conferencing and Webinar solutions. The product was launched at a time when there were already a few big players in the market. But Yugma made use of Cloud computing technologies that made the product easy to use and far cheaper than those of the larger players in the market. Using the latest developments in Cloud computing not only lowered the infrastructure costs for the company but also helped to build a remarkably lightweight architecture for the application. Since Internet penetration and bandwidth in countries across the world may not be identical, this architecture helps the product to interface and interact with Web applications more efficiently.

This experience was further corroborated by Sajan Inc., an early adopter of the product. Sajan, which provides language translation services, had used both WebEx and GoToMeeting, but became frustrated with both because of outages, downtime, and high costs. "Yugma just works," says Geoffrey Lee, CEO of the company. "The software is quick to download and setup, even if clients have never used it before." Sajan uses Yugma with their technical team to share and collaborate with developers in India.

Unlike many of its competitors' solutions, which just run on the Windows platform, Yugma can run on any Java enabled computer platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux), thus making it a universal solution. Another benefit of Yugma is that it has a slimmed down version that’s available for free! With the Yugma Free version, the user has the capability to share their screen with up to 20 people at a time. It also gives you a free conference call number or the option to use Skype (VoIP) for all participants to be able to connect for the audio part of the service. For written communication, public and private instant messaging is also included.

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