New Citrix GoToWebinar: The First Do-It-Yourself Affordable Way for Anyone to Conduct Online Events

WebKnowHow
Thursday, June 15, 2006; 07:05 AM

An on-demand solution for do-it-yourself Web events was announced by Citrix Systems, a leader in access infrastructure solutions. Citrix GoToWebinar, the company's collaboration offering, gives marketing professionals the simplest and most affordable solution available for conducting online events, such as large sales presentations and marketing events over the Web.

With its innovative All-You-Can Reach flat-rate plan, GoToWebinar enables any individual to present and extend reach to thousands of people and conduct unlimited Webinars for one flat monthly rate -- an industry first, according to the company.

"Reaching new markets and competing for customers is hard work for most companies but for individuals and small businesses, many lucrative opportunities have seemed far too costly, and simply eluded them until now," said Brett Caine, group vice president and general manager of Citrix Online, a division of Citrix Systems, Inc. "With GoToWebinar, we're changing all that by making it possible to reach customers anywhere in the world in a straightforward easy and affordable manner."

GoToWebinar makes it easy and affordable to reach and interact with online audiences. Novices and veterans alike can easily deliver online presentations to remote audiences, perform live product demonstrations, and provide training to any audience with connectivity to the Web. Delivered as an on-demand service, GoToWebinar allows users to start using web-events instantly with a flat-rate subscription to the service.

The Web-events solution delivers a simple approach for companies to reach and qualify their target audiences. MarketSharp, a firm that provides software solutions and services helping the fast-growing home remodeling industry, uses GoToWebinar as a better way to prospect and service customers online. "GoToWebinar makes it very efficient for us to get our message out to hundreds of people at once without traveling," said Tim Musch, director of Business at MarketSharp. "This easy-to-use service saves us about $30,000 a year in travel for sales seminars. When you add in the productivity gains, that savings rises significantly." Because the company can conduct sales seminars more rapidly to more prospective buyers, they have reduced the cost and time to generate leads. "GoToWebinar slashed our cost per sale by 50 to 75 percent without question," added Musch.

"As markets become more competitive and brands less distinguishable, sales and marketing organizations are facing mounting pressure to create efficient customer-centric processes that provide increased reach and revenues while keeping costs under control," said Roopam Jain, principal analyst, Conferencing and Collaboration at Frost and Sullivan. "Consequently, organizations must equip their sales and marketing teams with the latest technologies, such as GoToWebinar, to dramatically enhance productivity and drive innovation by improving the way they interact with customers, partners, suppliers and employees. Web collaboration is increasingly becoming an indispensable tool in accelerating sales and marketing processes while simultaneously reducing costs."

GoToWebinar, with capacity to scale to 1,000 attendees per event, expands upon the capability of the industry's simplest and fast-growing Web conferencing and collaboration service, Citrix(R) GoToMeeting(TM) Corporate 3.0. Both services will be available as a bundle beginning June 30. Some of the time-saving capabilities included with GoToWebinar are:

-- Full-service registration with real-time reports

-- Customized branding of Webinar materials and automated e-mail templates

-- Free integrated voice conferencing or toll-free service

-- Attendee polling and survey capability

-- Webinar dashboard to monitor audiences

-- Easy controls for quickly changing presenters

"We built GoToWebinar to fill the huge market need for a true do-it-yourself solution that allows customers to efficiently deliver their marketing messages, follow up on leads and close the loop on sales," said Brian Donahoo, vice president of product and client services at Citrix Online. "The powerful combination of large-scale Web events with GoToWebinar and small, ad-hoc meetings with GoToMeeting 3.0 gives customers a flexible solution for accelerating sales, marketing, training and business growth, anytime and anywhere."

For more information, prior to the June 30th on-sale date, visit www.gotowebinar.com/nyc.