Of my meetings this week 80% were on Zoom Meeting, 10% on GoTo and 10% on other. Zoom is winning the war on conferencing that everyone thought GoToMeeting (a LogMeIn company) had won. Just three years ago, 80% of my meetings were Join.me and GoTo.
LogMeIn grew through acquisitions, including LastPass in 2015. “In 2017, LogMeIn completed a merger with GetGo, the spin-off of the GoTo product line from Citrix (according to Wikipedia). Last year, LogMeIn purchased UC provider Jive for over $300M. If you follow the Cisco playbook (Broadsoft and Webex), this should have kinda sorta worked. It didn’t. Why?
A few reasons this didn’t work.
One, the launch or re-launch was uneventful – or as Seth Godin says was not remarkable. No one remarked on it. There was some buzz around the lower pricing but not enough to make a dent.
Two, at conferences, the GoTo people aren’t certain – or excited – about their own product offering. Launching or re-branding or re-launching requires internal buy-in and enthusiasm, because sales is about emotion. You transfer that emotion to the buyer (or partner). Clear, concise and repeated internal communications are necessary for a successful product launch.
Three, not enough partner mind-share. Webex and Teams have tens of thousands of partners certified in Cisco and Microsoft, respectively. Those partners have a business model wrapped around the vendor. There are still numerous partners who are not brand evangelists for either one. Find them Recruit them!
This is a time when free conferencing is declining amid the loss of revenue from inter-carrier compensation for the platform providers. Paid conferencing should be booming — but it should also be better!
How in 2019 does it not recognize my phone number and place me in the meeting? UberConference by Dialpad can do this (that product has a number of other UX issues that are making it hard to use but they have that one feature right.)
GoToMeeting has not really added any functionality. Add in easy to use scheduling, recording, transcription and some analytics which are becoming common place (Google AI?) and maybe start making in-roads against Zoom and Microsoft. BTW, I have no idea how Jive fits into the GoTo product or if it is stand-alone.
LogMeIn may be focused on other silos, but it looks like it spent $300M and lost its focus on the collab space. It has become Xerox in that regard. Xerox had PARC Labs and all the new technology but just couldn’t figure out what to do with it (or how to capitalize on it).
LogMeIn made 2 Gartner MQ: Challenger in Gartner’s 2019 Magic Quadrant for UCaaS, Worldwide; and Leader in Gartner’s 2019 Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions. They had market share. they have cool domain names like jive.com, join.me and goto.com. There is much to work with here to get back in the race.
LogMeIn has a host of other products including a specialty in remote support and endpoint management. There are ways to bundle to win.
They integrate with G+ Suite, Slack, Hipchat and Trello, which could be a place to start, since none of those apps have conferencing.