The Conference Coach™

Carolyn Bradfield

The older you get, the more nostalgic you get.  Normally, I’m not given to looking back, but sometimes I just can’t help it.  This summer, my small high school in LaGrange, Georgia is holding a multi-year class reunion.  It’s been a while since I’ve been to one of these, but this one is appealing because I get to visit with more people I went to school with.

This is going to tell you how old I am and how much of a small Southern town I come from.  We had one movie theater, one hamburger place and one pizza place.  You couldn’t buy alcohol because the county was dry and our schools weren’t integrated until I was a junior in high school.  The big activities were driving around (gas cost $.25 a gallon), going to the movies once a week, and “parking.”  (Don’t ask me about parking!).

Those were simple times where we had to make our own fun, find things to keep us engaged and navigate through some profound changes in society.  During high school, I saw the end of the Vietnam War, the end of school segregation and the beginning of the drug culture.   Times will never be as simple, as clear and as innocent as they were back then.

I’ve been in the conferencing industry for 20 years and I have to acknowledge the end of an era for a technology and a company I was very fond of.  A small group of entrepreneurs founded a company in the ‘90’s called Evoke that built the best mousetrap I’ve ever seen in conferencing.  They automated an audio conference call where you never had to worry about making a reservation or that there wouldn’t be space available for your call.  They added a simple web interface to control your call that was a forerunner of the way we all use web conferencing today.

The founders (Paul and Todd) always saw themselves as a web conferencing company, raised millions of dollars in the investment world and launched a competitive strike against the incumbent WebEx.  What they failed to realize is that in reality they had built a better mousetrap for audio conferencing by streamlining how a call was managed and conducted.  Their technology was way ahead of its time and the rest of the industry followed their lead.

WebEx proved to be the giant in the web conferencing industry, and Evoke who became Raindance, never gained enough traction to be huge and make their investors rich.  In 2006, the management team at Raindance finally gave up and sold to their company to industry giant InterCall.

Sometimes, as in this case, the bigger company fails to recognize that what they bought extends beyond the revenue and profits.   Raindance had an incredible corporate culture, young and talented employees, an advanced technology and data system, a well-developed web product, and loyal customers.  InterCall, in their infinite wisdom, decided to dismantle all of it.

On September 1, 2010, the audio conferencing technology that was simple to use, always reliable and so advanced is being turned off.  Because InterCall never recognized its uniqueness, its potential and its possibilities, they ignored it, favoring a system that is more complex with lots of moving parts.  They spent tens of millions of dollars trying to customize a data collection and billing system when the one they purchased had much of the components of what they needed.

There are still a number of customers that use the Raindance platform and they are going to be in for a shock to their system.  Everything about their conferencing experience is going to change and not necessarily for the better.

It’s the end of an era in the conferencing industry and I’m sad about that.  I think the customers are going to find that being given lots of billing choices, more features than they will ever use, and a system that is not nearly as streamlined and elegant is going to be a step down in the way they do business.

Paul and Todd, thank you for what you brought to the industry, to the type of company you created and the culture that you promoted.  Thank you for thinking outside the box and creating a better way to do business.

Carolyn Bradfield is the CEO of Copper Conferencing, a provider of easy-to-use audio conferencing and web conferencing communication tools. Copper also provides wrap-around services including online account, invoice and recording management. You can try Copper’s great web and audio conferencing services — FREE. Just sign up now.