As the world economy slows down, more and more companies are looking to alternative methods of communication and collaboration.

Many companies are trying to get into the hosted services business, traditional applications that were available only as onsite versions are being ported over to hosted versions, there’s plenty of competition and chaos. The industry titans are no longer the leaders of this new SAASy world, the underdogs and not as well known companies are making huge strides and gathering some good traction.

The bottom line is, users don’t want to pay a huge lump sum fee upfront to be able to use specific software, they want to be able to “rent” software in smaller time chunks and take the advantage of lower up-front investment offered by the “pay as you go” model.

The online hosted model is very well suited to the communication/collaboration industry. Some industry titans are charging huge fees for their online offerings, while some of the lesser known companies are offering free versions of software, which have plenty of capability that most small business will ever need.

One such lesser known company is dimdim. Although you have to pay for their pro and enterprise plans, the free plan can serve the purpose of many small/home offices for collaboration. Dimdim even offers an Open Source Edition of their software that you can deploy internally in your enterprise and enjoy the features of the enterprise edition

Dimdim offers many features on par or better than some of the features found in solutions from industry behemoths like Cisco, Citrix or even Microsoft. With dimdim you can essentially forego meeting someone face to face. Use video chat in combination with your presentation and you can do this across different platforms like Wintel or Mac. No need to download or install anything on our workstation and the best part is you can record the meetings you host online and retain them for future.

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