Interwise(R) Inc., today announced it is entering a new phase of company growth driven by sales of IP-based conferencing software as a core business application for enterprises. The new market opportunity is emerging as a result of traditional voice, Web and video conferencing technologies consolidating within corporate networks; it is being driven by enterprise demand for collaborative technologies that will alleviate the challenges of connecting distributed and mobile workforces, customers and supply chains.

This year, Interwise is already seeing more than 50% of its new business come from customers intending to deploy web conferencing widely as a core enterprise business application.

According to IDC, the combined market for Web conferencing and voice conferencing is about $7.7 billion, with voice conferencing comprising about 90% of the total today. Although both markets have grown based on per-minute conferencing service offerings, it is becoming harder for customers to accept the exorbitant charges, limited security and multiple overlapping products that these offerings bring with them. Furthermore, the departmental-level selling of legacy conferencing services has made it difficult for enterprises to control, or even know, their total conferencing costs.

As a result, many companies have now started centralizing their conferencing purchases to consolidate vendors and products, standardize capabilities for their employees and negotiate lower fees.

The transition of conferencing to a core business application enables customers to deliver rich conferencing and collaboration as a basic communication utility to every employee in the company. Over the past two years, Interwise has worked with numerous customers to refine a solution that blends the key capabilities of on-site software with the best attributes of hosted services to transform integrated voice, Web and video conferencing into a core business application.

Interwise Connect integrates voice, Web, and video conferencing within a single application for unlimited audio conferences, Web meetings, virtual classes, Webcasts, broadcasts and on-demand recordings.

Deployed as a core business application to all employees, it improves the frequency, speed and quality of both internal and external business activities. It delivers cost and business ROI to companies with distributed and mobile workforces, customers and supply chains. Furthermore, its ability to make use of customers' own networks lets companies securely reap the economic benefits of VoIP for conferencing, without having to engage in PBX and phone overhauls.