To improve employee productivity, reduce intra-office and long-distance communication costs, and create a huge market opportunity which adds to their bottom line, players like WebEx (a Cisco company), Microsoft and Yugma among others are pushing their online collaboration offerings to enterprises.

Online collaboration, they reason, is able to reach more business prospects by eliminating geographical constraints and is beneficial specially for enterprises.

It includes services like web conferencing, online meetings, online events and online training. Web conferencing comprises audio and video conferencing or 3G conferencing. These services are mostly used by institutions and corporations.

The market opportunity in India is huge, and growing fast. The video conferencing equipment market alone in 2007 grew 25 per cent over 2006. The video conferencing endpoint and infrastructure market in 2007 was estimated at $28.5 million (around Rs 115 crore).

"Though the market is quite closed when it comes to online collaboration, audio conferencing is the fastest growing segment for the industry," says an analyst with WebEx. "However, the industry is growing at a scorching rate," he adds.

WebEx, for instance, provides both service-based audio conferencing and poly-conference facility, which is equipment-based.

Minneapolis-based Yugma's offerings are compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux. It offers desktop sharing and free teleconferencing. "We provide visual components to online conferencing and its strength lies in spontaneous collaboration," says Lingaraj Mishra, CEO, Yugma.

Microsoft, too, recently launched its free Microsoft Office Live Workspace, which enables users to access and share documents anywhere.

It helps them to work collaboratively on a project in a password-protected, invite-only online workspace, eliminating version-control challenges when e-mailing drafts to multiple people. Even if people do not have a desktop version of Microsoft Office, they can still view and comment on the document in a browser.

"We have received tremendous interest from users in India. Of our 500 million users of Microsoft Office, we expect about 20 per cent use this web application," says Siddharth Mangharam, product manager, Office Live , Microsoft.

"With this application we are we are targeting small and medium enterprises, and schools and colleges. We have already prepared a marketing strategy that includes direct marketing in schools, colleges, malls," he adds.

Users, it appears, are learning the game. "I have been using this Web technology to train students across the globe for the past year and without the web technology and it would not have been possible for me to reach students in different parts of world," says Kalyan Chakravarthi, founding director, Csquare Learnings.

"Web conferencing is a lot easier than one would imagine. Controls can easily be handed over from one person to another and the whole interface is quite user-friendly, even for a technophobe," concurs Ramanujam Sridhar, CEO, Integrated Brand-Comm.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 helps organisations be more effective by providing a platform for sharing information and working together in teams, communities and people-driven processes.

"The Microsoft collaboration infrastructure leverages existing investments, is extensible, and interoperates with other systems. This means organisations can maintain a lower cost of ownership," explains Sanjay Manchanda, director, business division, Microsoft.

Productivity can be measured. For instance, WebEx uses a "Productivity Correction Factor". It is a number less than 1 and more than 0 that is used to correct the estimate of increase in productivity resulting from time saved to account for the inefficient transfer of time.

For instance, if the Productivity Correction Factor of a company is 0.7, it means that for every 1 hour of time saved, 70 per cent or 42 minutes was utilised in a productive manner by WebEx's sales staff.

Gopi Natarajan, CEO, Omega Health Care Management Services and a WebEx user, says: "Our productivity as a result of using web-based technologies has increased probably more than 30 per cent. We can get doubts clarified much faster, the client can actually ‘see' from the US the issues we are facing on our side and are able to suggest immediatechanges."