LogMeIn products Jive and GoToMeeting to be unified
The LogMeIn products Jive and GoToMeeting will be combined under a new brand, an integration that analysts say is necessary for the vendor to remain competitive.
LogMeIn plans to integrate Jive's cloud telephony with GoToMeeting's cloud video conferencing and collaboration. The move to unify the LogMeIn products comes as the vendor chases rivals Zoom and Cisco Webex, which already offer integrated portfolios.
The combined product would be among the most significant milestones in the company's three-year campaign to establish itself in the unified communications and collaboration (UCC) market. LogMeIn plans to release more details on the new offering at the Enterprise Connect conference in Orlando, Fla., next month.
LogMeIn acquired Jive Communications, a cloud PBX vendor targeting the small and midsize markets, for $357 million in February, after buying the GoToMeeting suite from Citrix in 2016. Before those purchases, the company primarily made remote access software.
LogMeIn sold 80,000 seats on Jive and GoToMeeting after bundling pricing for the two platforms in the second half of 2018, LogMeIn CEO Bill Wagner told investors earlier this month, according to a transcript of LogMeIn's fourth-quarter earnings call. The bundling was "a precursor of our integrated product we'll release here in 2019," he said.
A LogMeIn representative said the company would unveil "a new UCC brand" at Enterprise Connect, but the company declined to comment further, saying it had not finalized the upcoming announcement.
LogMeIn products need better alignment
LogMeIn's recent acquisitions have left the company with a set of collaboration products that are related to -- but not integrated with -- one another. In addition to Jive and GoToMeeting, the vendor also owns GoToWebinar for webcasting, OpenVoice for conference calls, and Join.me for small business web conferencing.
While LogMeIn has been figuring out how to handle this portfolio, smaller, more nimble vendors like Zoom and Slack have taken big chunks of the market, said Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst at ZK Research in Westminster, Mass.
GoToMeeting's market share has been hit particularly hard by the rise of Zoom, with anecdotal evidence suggesting that many customers have opted to switch to Zoom as their GoToMeeting licenses have expired, Kerravala said.
"At a bare minimum, if they are going to rebound and reemerge as a major collaboration vendor, they have got to bring [these products] together," Kerravala said. "It seems like they've just been collecting collaboration stuff without much thought towards the long-term plans."
From a technology standpoint, users currently get no benefit from using Jive and GoToMeeting together. Integrating the LogMeIn products so that users could seamlessly switch between the two of them could help boost sales of both by making the combination more appealing.
"They have a large install base on the different products that they have," said Irwin Lazar, analyst at Nemertes Research. "The challenge for them is to build a cohesive platform that can compete with the likes of 8x8, RingCentral, or any one of a number of BroadSoft-based services out there."
LogMeIn is trying to fight back from a beating over several months on Wall Street. The company's share value dropped 16.4% after announcing a global leadership restructuring earlier this month and plunged 23% on the day they released third-quarter financial forecasts that fell short of analyst predictions, according to the website Seeking Alpha.
