Web conferencing has become a popular communications medium in corporations for its ability to curb costs and improve productivity.

Rather than bring a group of engineers together from various locations for a face-to-face meeting, Web conferencing enables them to meet virtually, which eliminates travel hassles and expenses.

In addition, top company executives use it to communicate quickly and effectively with shareholders, the press and employees.

As the success of Web conferencing for one-to-many, scheduled, formal meetings has grown, companies have been on the lookout for ways to expand use of the service. Recently, these products have been enhanced, so employees can use them on informal, one-on-one bases that require quick, "ad-hoc" data interchanges.

"Companies want to use conferencing for not only internal but also for external communications, with customers and suppliers, and ad-hoc conferencing is suited to that desire," said Andy Nilssen, a partner at Wainhouse Research.

A number of factors are behind the move to ad-hoc conferencing, starting with intense market pressure. More than a dozen companies, including Cisco Systems, Citrix, Convoq, Genesys Conferencing, Internet MegaMeeting, Macromedia, Microsoft, Polycom, WebDialogs, WebEx Communications, WebEx, West and WiredRed Software, make these products.

"The Web conferencing market has been slow to develop, so many of the conferencing firms are now at a stage where they have to differentiate their products and demonstrate significant revenue growth," Nilssen told TechNewsWorld.

Traditionally, conferencing represented an expensive proposition, one that required companies to buy software, install it on their own servers, and maintain the system. There has been movement to outsourced services. "The market for Web conferencing services has been growing while use of internally maintained conferencing system has flattened out," stated Nilssen.

Recently, vendors have been moving to the software-as-a-service, or pay-as-you-go, pricing model. Here users are able to use Web conferencing services for as little as $50 per user per session; this type of pricing fits better with ad-hoc conferencing.

Consequently, there has been more interest in these products. While there has been a very gradual build up, it looks as though the ad-hoc conferencing market is now taking hold and a growing number of companies are taking advantage of it.