Our Company
When our founders started Encounter Collaborative, their goal was to address a conferencing market heading towards two and a half billion dollars - and potentially larger. Almost six years later, that market has already transitioned from occasional conference calling to a mainstream application supporting business fundamentals.
Getting conferencing right
Encounter's founders recognized the potential of this market while at Envoy Global, a company that provided services to customers ranging from Suzuki, Yamaha, Tektronix and Eddie Bauer to GE Medical Systems, IBM, Sun and Lucent. In July 2000 Encounter was spun out of Envoy Global. The founders were also aware that few vendors were providing conferencing bridge technology that actually delivered what customers wanted. They turned their attention to customer service, billing, provisioning and resources - knowing that when a company provides audio and web conferencing services it has to get those right. Then, understanding what was required, Encounter's team began to develop a platform that would address and exceed customers' needs, even if it meant taking longer to enter the market.
Encounter also recognized that it could not simply purchase an off-the-shelf conferencing bridge --because existing technology lacked the flexibility to meet customers' ever-changing requirements. Instead, Encounter defined a strategy and designed a proprietary architecture, not a component. The company has successfully provided hundreds of thousands of audio and web conferencing hours to both global and domestic companies by building a second-generation architecture, rather than building components such as a help desk, billing application or web interface.
Today's technology
Today we are involved in building our third generation platform, E3C - a platform that provides levels of integration and flexibility not found in third party technologies. We have committed ourselves to providing a robust, scaleable and customizable product that works the way customers need conferencing technology to work. E3C supports a vision that will lead the company to a dominant position in this market.
Our architecture enables us to not only bring a great product to market -- but to also integrate this product with key suppliers and partners - companies like Microsoft. As a resource manager, we can plug into our own switches, 3rd party switches (Lucent, Cisco, Softswitch) and 3rd party networks. We are also able to ride conferences over multiple networks giving us tremendous diversity. With 30 nodes across the US, Encounter offers a rock solid solution. And we believe that an integrated, comprehensive and managed solution provides a level of reliability and accuracy not available from other companies.
From Reservationless and Broadcast conferencing to virtual meetings, webcasts and our ShareItNow ™ technology -- and with clients that include Microsoft, The Call Center School, Phillips Semiconductor, HumaniNet, the Environmental Protection Agency, EPRI, and Continental Airlines, Encounter delivers successful conferencing experiences to customers every day. We also provide a level of support that is unparalleled in the industry. We invite you to get to know us and our services.
