Marratech was a Swedish company that made software for e-meetings (e.g., web conferencing, videoconferencing). It was acquired by Google in 2007.[1]
History
Marratech was founded in 1998, as a spin-off company from the Centre for Distance-Spanning Technology at the Luleå University of Technology. Founders include Dr. Dick Schefström (deceased), Prof. Peter Parnes, Johnny Widén, Prof. Kåre Synnes, Mikael Börjeson, Magnus Hedberg, Serge Lachapelle and Claes Ågren. The Marratech prototype was launched 1995 as part of an EU project called Multimedia Assisted Tele-engineering (MATES) project.
Marratech's first product, which offered voice, video, whiteboard and group instant messaging, was first released in November 1998. The first release required the presence of an IP multicast network and was built as a server-less architecture. The solution has since evolved to support both traditional IP Unicast and IP multicast, high security and multi-platform computing. For guaranteed, serverless, scalable data delivery over both Multicast and Unicast, Scalable Reliable Multicast (SRM) is used over the Real-time Transport Protocol, called SRRTP.
In 2004, Marratech introduced support for dialing out to IP telephones, land lines and mobile phones via the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). In 2005, H.323 support was added to communicate with traditional video conferencing equipment.