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When it comes to collaboration technology, the different levels of buy-in can be extreme. For some, web conferencing and team collaboration tools are simply a means of eliminating business travel. Others, like Boeing though, are betting on mission critical - even mission control - web conferencing.

With the recent culmination of a billion-dollar missile programme, the Boeing team decided that rather than coordinate the test firing from the launch site they would run the whole thing over web conferencing.

"Five years ago, people would never have trusted the robustness of a tool like this," says Bill Heil, COO of WebEx, which provides Boeing with more than a million minutes of real-time collaboration services a day. "It is part of everybody's daily life to collaborate at Boeing," says Heil.

Boeing may be exceptional in the extent of its commitment but other companies - from Salesforce.com selling to its CRM software service via web conferencing to Lex Vehicle Leasing dramatically reducing travel costs through video conferencing - are buying into online collaboration in a big way.

What is driving such take-up? According to Bob Hagerty, CEO of conferencing technology vendor, Polycom, globalisation stands out. "Companies want to get products to market more rapidly" - and that means streamlining the communications between employees and across the supply chain.

First steps

Despite many successes, take-up is far from universal. Indeed, Heil characterises the sector as still being in its infancy. "There are around 400 million knowledge workers around the world. Every one of those is collaborating all day long. And they are involved in a whole set of business processes - selling, supporting, training, whatever the core business process of their company is. Real-time collaboration could be a core part of their processes. So the potential is gigantic."

One way of measuring where organisations are on the adoption curve is to look at how they are using the technology. Are they using real-time collaboration tools in a scheduled way, to meet at a predetermined time; or are they using them in an ad hoc fashion?

In the first case, the paradigm is based on the classic meeting and collaboration tools are there to replace a physical, face-to-face encounter. That is not what this is all about in the longer term, says Heil. "The real benefit is when you are in the middle of some business process and you need to connect. You find out if the other parties are present and you meet in an ad hoc way, engage and conduct your business."

As the sophistication of this type of conferencing grows to encompass training, sales, support, product demonstrations and other areas, there is a move towards more sophisticated tools. Users want more than just to view another participant's slides; they expect integrated voice (and where appropriate, video); some want instant messaging and presence to show when someone is available for an ad hoc meeting; they want whiteboards, shared space and discussion threads; they want conferencing integrated within their portals and workflow; they want content management tools to move around relevant content; but, above all, they want reliability, ease-of-use and security.

The convergence of technologies around IP networks is also a particular catalyst, says Hagerty, enabling voice, video and images to be part of the same interaction.

Real-time race

And vendors are leveraging their different technology strengths to meet those requirements. For example, WebEx is the pioneer of on-demand web conferencing; Polycom and Genesys come from a videoconferencing background; Cisco is attacking the market from its strength in IP telephony. But other leading vendors include IBM (through its Lotus division), Raindance Communications, Interwise, Centra, Cisco and Oracle.

The prize they are chasing in the web conferencing software arena was worth $422.4 million in 2004, but there was a further $165.4 million in team collaboration software, according to research by industry advisor Gartner. That combined total will almost triple over five years to hit $1.4 billion in 2009.

How functionality will be delivered is a subject of fierce debate. Gartner believes that hosted services - at least today - meet the basic web conferencing needs of 80% of enterprises, it says. But going forward, it sees web conferencing installed by more organisations 'on-premise', with systems incorporating presence and other instant messaging functions.

By the end of the decade, many conferencing and presence mechanisms will be delivered as middleware and operating system services, Gartner concludes.

As that suggests, few observers doubt that real-time, web-based collaboration will ultimately be part of the fabric of almost every organisation. The only debate is about when it will enter the mainstream and what the specific forms of adoption will be at different types of organisation.