LogMeIn rebranded today to better reflect their primary product line. The company is now known as GoTo. Product names that we care about on this blog remain largely the same, but now get a space in the name. So GoToMeeting is now GoTo Meeting and GoToWebinar is now GoTo Webinar.
You can compare the old and new versions of the product lists as presented on the company home page by clicking on the following two thumbnail pictures. Old LogMeIn branding is on the left and new GoTo branding is on the right.
For those of you keeping track, the GoTo products started out as collaboration utilities from a Santa Barbara company called ExpertCity. GoToMeeting was announced in early 2004, around the same time that Citrix acquired ExpertCity. Citrix continued to develop and market the product family, introducing GoToWebinar in 2006.
In 2016, LogMeIn took over the GoTo collaboration products from Citrix in a merger agreement that separated them from the rest of Citrix’s business. Since then, the products have continued to evolve under the LogMeIn corporate name. They have benefitted over the last couple of years from the worldwide boost in remote work spurred by COVID response.
Today’s press release introduces the new company branding, but also highlights a new “simplified product portfolio with a single application and two flagship products.” GoTo Resolve will handle IT management and support, which isn’t the focus of this blog. GoTo Connect will now be the universal umbrella encompassing all the company’s collaboration solutions, including GoTo Meeting and GoTo Webinar.
The announcement says that GoTo Connect also gives customers access to additional features such as cloud telephony, messaging, contact center capabilities, Facebook integration, website chat queues, and more. It’s an attempt to offer a full Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solution suite.
I asked whether GoTo Meeting and GoTo Webinar would continue to exist as individual product offerings, and received confirmation that they could still be licensed as standalone products. Existing customers of these products will access them through the new universal administrative front end, but should not see changes in their operation for running meetings and webinars. GoTo Webinar remains an added-value, added-cost option for those who need to run structured, presentation-oriented web events.
The third major part of the press release announced a new GoTo Partner Network to help stimulate global sales growth via Managed Service Providers, resellers, and distributors. It’s obvious that GoTo wants to leverage the current momentum and awareness of remote work solutions that has lifted the collaboration market in order to increase their penetration into multiple channels and geographies.
I just logged into my existing GoTo Webinar account to check on a customer event scheduled for later today. As of this morning, everything looks exactly as it always has inside the GoTo Webinar product itself. It still shows the old LogMeIn branding, GoToWebinar name, and the same administrative layout and functionality as before. So the new corporate branding change seems to be functionally transparent to existing users with no impact on operations. I would presume (or hope!) that the company will put out notifications and banner announcements before changing the operational interface so that hosts and administrators are not blind-sided by any new look-and-feel that might be coming up.
I use GoTo with customers on a regular basis, so I’ll stay on top of any future changes that impact operations and report if I see something you need to know about.
