BANGALORE, INDIA: The next generation of Cisco Webex Application, currently under development, will offer businesses a real opportunity to collaborate and drive efficiency in between transactions, said Kiran Datar, managing director, Cisco Webex Communications India Pvt Ltd. while providing a glimpse of the new application at the technical conference on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), India 2008.

Delivering his keynote address on 'The drive towards on demand platform ', Datar said that the new Webex comes with customized features and will have multiple new widgets on a single dashboard in order to allow users do multiple functions at the same time.

According to him, the new application will allow the users to collaborate with persons across firewalls too and will be delivered on the MediaTone Network.

Datar noted that Web innovations were happening in a faster pace. "It has been so fast and steady that even IT managers were finding it difficult to keep in pace with the developments."

He said that the Cisco Webex has been a global leader in on demand applications for collaborative businesses on the web. About 81 of the top Fortune 100 companies were using Cisco Webex solutions. " The solutions are being used in 95 countries by 3.5 million people ever y month to communicate and collaborate online ," he said.

Why should enterprises adopt SOA? "Globalization and businesses challenges being the main issues, enterprises need to concentrate on core competencies and adopt new architecture," Datar said.

However, enterprises are still faced with many challenges that required immediate attention. " While the employees were getting more adopted to use Web 2.0 tools and want flexibility in terms of devise , enterprises are still caught in the complexities of security, IP Protection and QoS among others, " he observed.