In this Provider Spotlight series, we had the opportunity to get behind the scenes footage and learn more about AnyMeeting.com - a simple, affordable, full-featured conferencing tool.
AnyMeeting enables its users to meet in real time with other users worldwide over the internet. Although AnyMeeting caters to the needs of small businesses, its services provide solutions to medium-sized businesses and larger companies as well.
Although basic in nature, AnyMeeting offers quality service with a clean interface, clear sound, and intuitive controls. A download isn't even required to use AnyMeeting. Only a presenter wanting to share screen shots has to download the application. All other presenters and attendees can simply join in from their computers. Attendees joining through the use of a smartphone or tablet must download the app as well.
We would like to welcome David Gerken, AnyMeeting's Chief Operations Officer, as he takes a moment to answer a few questions about the services and sheds some light on what their company has to offer.
Here’s the transcribed Q&A between myself and David:
about AnyMeeting as a company?
David Gerken: People probably think of us as a web conferencing tool, interestingly our 2 largest use cases are webinars and phone conferencing. So we’re really an all-in-one conferencing tool and I don’t think a lot of people recognize that about us.
David: AnyMeeting is web conferencing for small business, so we are a simple, affordable, yet full featured alternatives to companies like WebEx and GoToMeeting.
David: So our focus is squarely on the small business and what that means is it’s around 3 core things, as I mentioned. It’s around simplicity, the affordability, and the range of features that the tool offers. In terms of simplicity that’s about the clean, simple UI, it’s also about web based models for attendees: so they just click a link and they’re into the meeting, simple for hosts and attendees. In terms of affordability, we’re about half the cost of companies like WebEx and GoToMeeting. In terms of feature sets, we’re really positioned to serve all of the different conferencing needs of a small business, from a small web or video phone conference all the way up to a large webinar.
David: We do go into the mid-market, our message of simplicity and affordability is catered to the small business but it’s one that resonates with medium business as well. So we serve customers anywhere from a few employees to a few hundred employees and up. We do actually have a plan we call a ‘company plan’, which enables companies to provision and manage multiple accounts for large organizations, so we serve a fair number of companies from 2 to 500 employees as well.
David: We offer a completely free service for small business to get started with the tool, it’s a limited function enables up to 4 attendees. Doesn’t have all of our pro features but it does allow you to do a lot of the basics like screen sharing and video conferencing and web conferencing. And then we have pro services, pro plans that really provide the full range of features including things like recording, and much higher attendants level, custom branding, and in meeting file sharing, the full fledge product, so a premium model to get you started, that get your exposure, for basic web and video conferences and then a full feature pro plan to really get the full range of meeting needs covered.
experience model?
David: It’s really about simplicity, but again serving all of those different types of use cases a small business might have. So it’s a really clean, simple UI. Not a lot of bells and whistles, not a lot of clutter, very easy for meeting hosts as well as for meeting attendees to get in and get comfortable with very quickly which is particularly important if your say in a sales role and interacting with people who never used this tool, the last thing you want is any kind of complication or confusion on the part of people joining that meeting, so we try to keep it very simple for everyone.
David: For small businesses where your limited in terms of budget, and your IT resources and you probably have a lot of use cases your team is going to need, some may be doing a marketing webinars, others maybe be doing sales calls, others may be doing collaborations with internal teams or vendors. We encourage smaller businesses to look for a tool that can serve all of those different use cases and one that’s very simple because again you don't have the IT resources you can go to or you don't have the time to invest in a lot of training in this, you want something that’s really gonna work right out of the box for everyone.
David: We just very recently launched the simplest way EVER to launch a conference call. All you need to do to launch a conference call is write an email to the people you want to invite, you CC ‘talk@anymeeting.com’, and you hit send. We immediately follow up with an email to you and all of your invitees with the conference call details.You can do the same within the calendar invitation, so whatever calendar tool you might be using, Outlook, Google Calendar, just create your calendar invitation as normal, invite ‘talk@anymeetng.com’, and we likewise will send conference details to everyone and then 15 minutes before that scheduled meeting, we’ll send reminders. So its the simplest way ever to launch a conference call, you don’t need an account with AnyMeeting, it's completely free. All you need to know is ‘talk@anymeeting.com’ and add it to any email or calendar invitation.
David: Actually the very full featured conference service, So you can have as many as 200 people in that conference call. Again its completely free, no strings attached.
David: We encourage you to just jump into that free trial and share with people on your team and get the feedback from the people that are going to be using it day-to-day.
