Tibco has made it possible to plan, manage and launch third-party web meeting and video chat services from its Tibbr enterprise social networking (ESN) suite.
The new feature, called Tibbr Meetings, gives users the ability to trigger web meeting and video conferencing sessions from within the suite's interface on Microsoft's Skype, Cisco's WebEx and Google's Hangouts.
Tibbr Meetings was conceived after Tibco decided it wouldn't make sense to build a native web meeting and video conferencing component for Tibbr. In its experience, Tibco has found that most organizations are already using an existing product of this sort.
"We want to let customers use whatever [product] they want," said Ram Menon, Tibco's president of social computing. The company may add support for other online meeting and video conferencing systems and services.
Unlike Tibco, other ESN vendors are opting to add such a native component to their suites. That's the case of Jive Software, which last year acquired Bitplay, the maker of online meeting and video conferencing service Meetings.io. Jive is working to integrate Meetings.io with its ESN suite.
Meanwhile Cisco not only has WebEx but also Jabber for IM and audio/video communications, the WebEx Social ESN product and high-end telepresence systems.
Then there are the big collaboration and communication vendors IBM and Microsoft, which have very broad stacks that include ESN products, email, calendaring and IM and video conferencing.
Microsoft has the Exchange email server, Yammer ESN suite, collaboration server SharePoint and IM, audio/video and telephony server Lync. Microsoft is in the process of integrating Lync with its consumer and small business IM and VoIP Skype service.
IBM has Notes/Domino for email and collaboration, Connections for ESN and Sametime for online meetings and video/audio conferencing.
It will be interesting to see how customers respond to Tibco's decision to facilitate the use of third-party web meetings and audio/video conferencing products with Tibbr instead of developing a native component of this type for it.
Juan Carlos Perez covers enterprise communication/collaboration suites, operating systems, browsers and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Juan on Twitter at @JuanCPerezIDG.