How My 1990s Startup Helped Pioneer Web Conferencing

From Telephone Conference Calls to Zoom

Living here in Portland and consulting for early-stage companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, I regularly find myself on Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and Zoom web meetings. But I have a unique perspective on these ubiquitous conference calls. My second startup, Latitude Communications, was an innovator in this exact space, starting with “data-enabled voice conferencing” back before the turn of the century! (It still feels weird saying that!)

The Dawn of Digital Conferencing

Latitude was founded in 1993, and I joined as the company's first product manager in 1994. Computer telephony was just taking off, and IT departments were beginning to adopt on-premises server technology to provide services internally that had previously been exclusive to telephone networks: voice messaging, automatic call distribution for call centers, and conferencing. Latitude became a pioneer in conferencing technology.

Our product was the MeetingPlace conference server that allowed companies to sidestep the crushing costs charged by major carriers for multi-party conference calls. When Latitude was founded, AT&T's list price for telephone conference calls was 53 cents per participant per minute. As such, a one-hour call with five participants carried a staggering list price of $159! While AT&T offered volume discounts to large customers, even by the time I left the company, it wasn't difficult for businesses to build a compelling ROI case for running conferencing in-house with as little as one hour of daily utilization per conference "port."

Innovation Over Cost Savings

In reality, cost savings weren't the primary driver for most companies adopting this technology. The real catalyst was innovation, or rather, the lack thereof from traditional service providers. Companies like AT&T had grown complacent, while computer telephony providers were racing to bring new capabilities to market.

At Latitude, we pushed boundaries by supporting:

• Exchange calendar integration for automatic conference call setup

• Fax servers for on-demand delivery of presentations

• RealAudio streaming for on-demand playback of audio conference recordings

• LDAP directory integration to secure access to conferences, presentations, and recordings

Our customer base spanned the Fortune 500, including leading financial institutions, high-tech companies, and consulting firms.

The Screen Sharing Revolution

The natural evolution from voice-only conferences was screen sharing capability. To standardize this functionality, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), part of the United Nations, adopted a protocol called T.120. Initially embraced by videoconference equipment vendors like PictureTel and Compression Labs, the technology gained widespread adoption when Microsoft bundled T.120 capabilities into Windows through a program called NetMeeting.

However, connecting multiple parties via NetMeeting in peer-to-peer fashion proved difficult and often incompatible with corporate networks. A Lexington, Kentucky company called DataBeam solved this challenge by offering T.120 bridging technology.

Through a technical and business partnership, Latitude integrated DataBeam's technology into our product line. We created an integrated experience combining voice and T.120 data conferencing into a single platform, all manageable through Microsoft Exchange calendaring.

NASA was an early beta tester that adopted this technology internally. We did a press event at the Computer Telephony Expo tradeshow in March of 1998 alongside Gartner, DataBeam, and Microsoft. The highlight video is here.

The integration of voice and data conferencing drove tremendous sales success. At one point, a single Latitude enterprise customer (Hewlett Packard) had deployed more data conferencing "ports" (concurrent user licenses) than all of networkMCI, a leading service provider!

Explosive Growth and Recognition

The innovation of a conference server fueled Latitude's rapid expansion. From 1994-1998, Latitude ranked as the fifth fastest-growing company in Silicon Valley, achieving over 20,533% revenue growth—trailing only behind Siebel Systems (782,978%), Excite (187,081%), Netscape (64, 240%), and Incyte Pharmaceuticals (55,378%). We completed our IPO in 1999.

The Technology Evolution

The data-enabled voice conferencing using telephones and NetMeeting that seemed so cutting-edge then feels charmingly antiquated today. As PCs and web browsers became more powerful, NetMeeting became unnecessary for screen sharing, and the T.120 protocol was largely abandoned in favor of proprietary web conferencing protocols. Latitude pivoted from DataBeam's T.120 technology to other providers to deliver web conferencing capabilities.

Simultaneously, as networking technology advanced, traditional telephone voice conferencing began giving way to IP telephony. Latitude adapted by forging a relationship with Cisco and developing VoIP capabilities within our platform. This evolution ultimately led to Cisco acquiring Latitude as part of their enterprise VoIP strategy.

The Service Model Wins

Perhaps most importantly, the industry was shifting toward the "as-a-Service" delivery model. While Latitude's business centered on providing in-house equipment, companies like WebEx offered hosted services.

Delivering conferencing "as-a-Service" proved to be a better overall approach because it eliminated the need for each customer to install lots of phone lines or extra internet bandwidth. Instead of worrying about having enough capacity or scheduling ports ahead of time, customers could rely on the service provider’s large-scale infrastructure to handle demand automatically

As such, WebEx eventually became Cisco's leading conferencing solution, and the Latitude MeetingPlace product line was discontinued.

In an interesting twist of fate, a WebEx founding engineer later created Zoom in response to Cisco's eventual underinvestment in the conferencing space. The pandemic then accelerated Zoom's adoption (55.91% market share), prompting Microsoft (32.29% market share) and Google (5.52% market share) to make substantial investments in their competing “as-a-Service” platforms.

Full Circle

So here we are, full circle. Latitude was an important but largely forgotten catalyst in this industry's development. The corporate adoption of rich media, remote meetings began more than twenty years before the pandemic ever hit.

Today, as I continue to join more Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet calls from my Portland home office, I'm reminded of how the technology business works. Innovation comes in waves, building on the foundations laid by previous generations of entrepreneurs and engineers. The 53 cents per minute conference calls of the 1990s evolved into the virtually free video meetings that now power our global economy.

It's a fascinating reminder that today's "overnight successes" often have roots stretching back decades, built by companies and people whose contributions may be forgotten but whose impact lives on in every web meeting we do today.