Google brings video conferencing to its Office

TechCrunch picked up on Google adding another piece to its growing suites of Office applications. The company acquired Marratech AB, a Swedish startup (see the Wikipedia page) with a video conferencing applications, including an interactive whiteboard and application sharing. It competes with established players including Microsoft, Raindance, Adobe and WebEx, which was just acquired by Cisco for over $3 billion.  

It's not a super lightweight Web application, and requires a download, but work across multiple platforms and supports corporate standards for video conferencing.

Here is an excerpt from a video conferencing comparative review in Network Computing from a year ago:

Marratech 6.0 scored well on our features evaluation, boasting high-quality audio and video over IP. In fact, in our evaluations of audio and video quality, Marratech led the pack. We were especially pleased with the ability to have private conversations with other session attendees. Like Breeze and e/pop, Marratech offers multiparty video, but its was the most stable and robust. Plus it has a voice-activated option so that the person speaking the longest goes to the larger video window. Other video-enabled participants are shown in thumbnail images--more than sufficient for most collaboration purposes.

Like all of the in-house applications we tested, Marratech licenses its server software and provides client software for free. It also offers a Time-to-Meet hosted option and a Meet Now! service that lets participants enter a session from a Web browser, without downloading the Marratech client.