Centra Software

Products (current situation, should put this into intro)

Centra Software is the pioneer in developing specialized software applications that facilitate online business collaboration, enabling the development of stronger business relationships, collaborative commerce, and corporate training and learning. Centra’s products include the internet infrastructure for comprehensive live collaboration and functionalities such as real-time content sharing and data exchange, real-time interaction like Q&A and VoIP (voice over internet).  The products are also designed to be very reliable, easy to use and install, and able to handle many concurrent users. Centra has three core products:

1. Symposium: Symposium is the flagship product at Centra. Symposium provides a virtual classroom experience for hands-on training and interactive team collaboration with up to 250 participants.
2. eMeeting: eMeeting is a subset of symposium, which allows company to run both internal and external virtual meetings for up to 100 participants. It includes features like simultaneous slide import and mark-up, yes/no polling, multiple choice surveys, private/public text chats, co-presenters and raise-hand buttons.
3. Conference: Conference is an interactive seminars and corporate briefings to a dispersed audience up to 1,000 participants. Conference is also a subset of symposium.

To future understanding Centra’s product portfolio, we will use the growth-share matrix to rank the products on the basis of their relative market shares and market growth rates (figure ). According to Forrester Research, business to business (B2B) e-commence will increase from $43 Billions in 1998 to $1.3 Trillions in 2003 (citation ). In another words, Centra’s product portfolio should all experiences a high market growth rate. On the other hand, eMeeting and Conference are experiencing a few strong competitions, especially with WebEx, so their market shares remind low. For the e-learning market, Symposium was the market leader and held about 50% share of revenues. To conclude, we’ve categorized both eMeeting and Conference into question marks and Symposium into Star.

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Product Recommendation:

Product Innovation - Symposium:

Centra is the market leader in e-learning and their flagship’s product, Symposium, has been capturing around 50% of the market revenue. In order for Centra to remain their status in the industry, one option is to focus heavily on the R&D for Symposium. If they can continue to innovate and differentiate Symposium from the rest of e-learning competitors, they can create their own blue ocean and also increase the barrier of entry for new competitors. On the other side, the profit margin for Symposium is much higher than eMeeting and Conference. Both eMeeting and Conference are a subset of features from Symposium, so the R&D cost for these two products are relatively low. Also, eMeeting and Conference tend to have a shorter sales cycle, so the acquisition cost should also be lower. Given Symposium’s licsencing fee is $35,000 and the up front costs for eMeeting and Conference are $15,000 and $1,000 respectively. Profit is revenue minus cost, so Symposium will provide a higher profit for Centra.