The movement toward a “distributed enterprise” has many IT staffs analyzing collaborative applications, from wikis to whiteboards, conferencing to messaging.

Although I can easily make a case for just about any collaborative application for virtual employees, one has been growing significantly in the past two years.

Web conferencing has become the top IP-based real-time collaborative application in use at companies, with 79% of the participants in Nemertes’ Building the Successful Virtual Workplace benchmark reporting adoption. Compare that to our research from the previous year when only 32% of businesses said they used the technology!

It won’t be long before Web conferencing is as ubiquitous as e-mail. WebEx (recently acquired by Cisco) and Microsoft Live Meeting claim more than half of the market, according to the benchmark. IBM Lotus Sametime Web Conferencing and Cisco's MeetingPlace led for premises-based solutions. Meanwhile, other providers, such as Go To Meeting (owned by Citrix) is picking up steam particularly among small and midsize businesses.

Companies use hosted services over three times more frequently than internally managed solutions. This is very important for the distributed enterprise. By using a hosted service, Web conferencing becomes a simple application for both the user and the administrator.

Enterprises use Web conferencing tools for a variety of applications including internal and customer-facing broadcasts, internal and external group collaboration, training, and product demonstrations. IT executives have told us they are seeing significant increases in the usage of Web-conferencing systems, which really is no surprise.

When more people are working remotely from each other and their supervisors, they need an easy way to share spreadsheets, documents, presentations, and drawings. Increasingly at Nemertes (a virtual company), we use Web conferencing at nearly all internal meetings because we all usually need to be looking at some document. Passing control of that document—or sharing control of the document—has become easier as the Web conferencing vendors continue to simplify the tools, while adding new features.

One of the new features we found on Go To Meeting allows the presenter to see when conference participants are active or inactive. Switch applications during a presentation to check e-mail and the presenter will see that you have gone inactive. So next time the boss is running a Web conference, you may want to keep multitasking to a minimum!

Robin Gareiss is executive vice president and senior founding partner of Nemertes Research. Click  here for the newsletter archive.