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Thursday, March 25, 2010

RHUB review

RHUB is a company which offers “meeting recording, Web Conference, Remote Access, Webinar software Delivered in Appliances”. It is an interesting model, especially given that there are a lot “software only” solutions in this space (GoTo meeting for example, just to name the biggest of them). They tout the simplicity of the product, especially that you don’t need any software installed to attend a meeting (I assume that it works using some kind of browser plugin – Flash or Java – and technically you do need that to be installed) Update: the folks from RHUB commented below and they pointed me towards their demo page. They seem to have a nice fallback mechanism, where by the main method involves Flash, but if it isn’t available, it falls back to Javascript + static images (although I assume that you loose most of the features, including voice, in that version). Very nice.

Simplicity would be a welcome addition to this area, since too many times have I seen “virtual” conferences spending tens of minutes on setting up the meeting (and it is quite frustrating).

For pricing they use the same model as the software-only solutions, namely a per-user license. If we compare the prices, you will conclude that the cheapest unit is equivalent to one and half years of GoToMeeting subscriptions, which is acceptable. I see this being a good solution for larger virtual training events (universities for example), however the value for smaller shops is not that clear. I worry that using a physical device means that your entire staff looses connectivity when/if the device goes down (because of a power / ISP outage). If your workforce is distributed around the globe (or even in one country), “cloud” service could route around the problem for the people who still have Internet access. Update: (again, from the comment below): the company seems to have a fallback solution for such outages, where by they offer services using their (hosted) equipment during outages, free of charge.

Full disclosure: this is a paid review from ReviewMe. Under the terms of the understanding I was not obligated to skew my viewpoint in any way (ie. only post positive facts).

3 comments:

  1. Hi,

    Thanks for the review. I just want to point out that RHUB's no download attendance option does not require downloads of any kind. No flash, no java, nothing. If you can view Google Map then you can attend a meeting. We have more information on our website about this.
    http://www.rhubcom.com/v4/web_conferencing/4-in-1-web_conference_benefits.html#no_download

    In the unfortunate case that your appliance is down for whatever reason, we do provide users with temporary accounts of our hosted service free of charge until their appliance is back up and running again. So they will never have to worry about losing a minute of their work time.

    Thanks,
    The RHUB Team

    ReplyDelete
  2. @RHUB: Thank you for clarifying some of my points and addressing my concerns. It is very nice to see such a level of new-media consciousness in a company. I've updated the original post to reflect the new information.

    I would have one suggestion if I may: maybe you could offer easy to access demo accounts to people interested in the product. I've had to speculate on many of the points because I didn't have access to such a demo account.

    Regards.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous10:09 PM

    GoMeeting may be a big competitor but I'd say RHUB biggest competitor to 'dethrone' is Bomgar. Both take the way of appliance-based solutions. These are self-hosted which is nice, but the problem is you are relying on an appliance that can only be serviced by RHUB or Bomgar. Thus that is how they continually make money off the product.

    Another self-hosted solution that DOES NOT require an appliance is ScreenConnect (http://www.screenconnect.com/). Instead, it can be hosted off any Windows OS. Once the host is established you can connect via Windows, iOS or Linux. I prefer this software to that of appliance based because there are no continual service fee associated with it. Once you buy it is yours to keep.

    ReplyDelete