The Dimdim opportunity
It's good to see TechCrunch picking up on Dimdim's launch of its hosted Web-conferencing solution. But I think it misses the main driver of Dimdim's opportunity:
The open-source strategy followed by Dimdim makes most sense when customers want to manage the software on-premise, and it's not so important when everything's hosted in the cloud. But it's good to see competition nipping at the heals of giant WebEx.
No, it actually makes the most sense for manufacturers that are looking to embed Web conferencing into other solutions. The same is true for Ringside Networks. Arguably, we didn't need another Web conferencing solution (Dimdim) or social-networking platform (Ringside).
What we do need are such platforms that can be expanded and integrated into other solutions. Open-source solutions that remain islands, developed and deployed by one company, are much less interesting than open-source solutions that are developed and deployed by a community. Community provides the opportunity for Dimdim.
In short, Dimdim isn't cool because it's open-source Web conferencing. It's cool because of what open-source Web conferencing allows technology providers to do with Web conferencing that price and proprietary licensing hitherto precluded.
Matt Asay is general manager of the Americas and vice president of business development at Alfresco, and has nearly a decade of operational experience with commercial open source and regularly speaks and publishes on open-source business strategy. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
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Thanks for your post. As you say in your post, open source has great alignment with onsite installations and some of our early adopters are service providers and they are indeed
using Dimdim onsite.
Also, as you wrote "What we do need are such platforms that can be expanded and integrated into other solutions." Dimdim's integration with open source products such as Moodle, Sugar, Docebo, etc is creating the real-time web just as the Apache webserver created the non-realtime web.
It's this idea of building the real-time web that inspires us at Dimdim.
Warm regards,
ddg
CEO - Dimdim
DimDim has been introduced to me by someone who is deeply involved in the landscape of Enterprise Social Networking Software (it looks promising).
As an external consultant I was asked to help their partners and customers to easy the adaptation process being waved-in into the business processes, so optimum performance of collaboration can be reached.
While doing this, so many things have come to my attention. One of them is that customers are demanding an fully integrated 'Collaboration' environment without the hassle of any client issue's (not to have any software installed on workstations). When forming an dispersed team into a 'collocated virtual team' it's essential to be able to start web-conference from within the 'Social Networking Software'. So in that respect I agree with Matt's comment that it should integrate with other 'Open Source' initiatives, not only limited to Sugar.
Next to that, and I do not have tested the in-house version (only the hosted one), and only if the comment's are true, it's not in the real spirit of open-source to limit the number of conferences and attendees in the community versions.
Regards,
Marcel.
PS: DD; I'm sorry I could not find your real First name.
Please check out our new Dimdim Open Source Community Edition v 3.5 (or Dimdim "Eagle" for short) It removes all these restrictions, adds some compelling new features (like 2 way video chat) and now comes in a handy, single VMWare image you can download and get running fast! We're serious about open source and we're passionate about our mission to allow the world to meet freely.
Enjoy! - Steve at Dimdim
http://www.dimdim.com
http://www.spreed.com