Wikipedia
Marratech was a Swedish company that made software for e-meetings (e.g., web conferencing, videoconferencing).
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, Prof. Peter Parnes, Johnny Widén, Prof. Kåre Synnes, Mikael Börjeson, Magnus Hedberg, Serge Lachapelle and Claes Ågren.
The Marratech prototypes saw the light of day in 1995 as part of an EU project called Multimedia Assisted Tele-engineering (MATES) project.
Marratech's first products, offering voice, video, whiteboard and instant messaging for groups, 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.
A distributed architecture is made possible by doing all the processing, mixing, encoding and encryption on the clients, relieving the servers and increasing scalability.
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.
In 2007, Marratech's video conference software was acquired by Google. Most engineers and key personnel have moved to Google.1
Some of the key features included in Marratech are:
- High quality voice for groups with private audio feature
- Interactive group whiteboard
- Multi party video
Some of the key underlying technologies are:
- 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) end-to-end encryption
- Support for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux on the client and server side.
- Support for bandwidth saving clusters
- Support for IP Unicast, IP Multicast or both
- Support for H.323 (dial in and out, E.164) and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)
- H.264 video
The solution includes a freely downloadable client and a server, called the Marratech Manager.
Users include Alcatel Alenia Space, Verizon, the Swedish Police Department, The Swedish Army and a number of Universities around the world.
Google has finally bought Marratech. Google plans its use for their staff members initially and later they might come out with a massive change in the software for public use.
December 12, 2009: Marratech announced that it would close down its website around Christmas 2009.
February 19, 2010: Marratech homepage gives information that it has suspended all its services, its server and no longer allows download of either client or server software.