At the stroke of 4pm, UK time, on Friday December 10, a group of drug company executives from across the world will sit down at their desks, pick up their phones and stare fixedly at their computer screens.

To the untutored eye, they will not be doing very much. But appearances, as always, are deceptive.

The execs will actually be taking part in a single meeting, an online conference brought straight to their offices via the internet.

On their screens they will see the faces of Dr Eshetu Wondemagegnehu, the World Health Organisation's leading expert in counterfeit medicines, and Dr Peter Rost, a doctor and vice-president at Pfizer, both talking live from their own offices somewhere in the United States.

Over the next hour or so, the participants sitting in Europe, North America and Japan will get to hear the latest news on the threat of the spread of unlicensed drugs. They will be able to read reports and study statistics sent straight through to their desktops. If they feel they have anything constructive to say, they will also be able to butt in over the phone line to make their point.

By the time it is all over, they will have become the latest collection of managers to have discovered the joys of web conferencing (brought to them in this particular case by Canadian conferencing company Xtalks).

They will also have tapped into one of the fastest-growing areas of communications technology around at the moment. Researchers The Yankee Group are among those predicting strong growth for the web conferencing sector, albeit from a low base – from $480 million last year to an estimated $700 million by the end of 2004.

The core attraction of the technology is its ability to hold meetings made up of far flung groups of people without all the clutter and equipment associated with video-conferencing systems. All that is needed to join an online conference is a phone line, a computer and an internet connection – preferably broadband.

There are a number of reasons why all that simplicity and connectivity is attractive to the modern day worker according to Maria Krinsky, spokesperson for San Francisco software group Macromedia. "There are a variety of business drivers impacting the rapid growth of the web conferencing market," she said.

"Disparate employee offices, increasing customer and prospect communications, and expanding partner networks are just a few of them…Audio, video, or data communication in isolation are no longer enough to effectively communicate and collaborate."

Macromedia's own offering in the conferencing space – Breeze – vies for customers with some of the biggest names in the software space, among them Oracle, sector-leader Webex Communications and, inevitably, Microsoft.

Just last week, IBM upped the stakes in the sector by launching a souped-up version of its own Lotus Web Conferencing Service. The new product was launched as a hosted service, one that customers can subscribe to and pay for by the user.

The subscriber based service – also offered by Breeze and other competitors – makes things even easier for today's far-flung teams, said Sabine Schilg, Director of Software as a Service for IBM Software Group.

"Convenient solutions delivered as a service over the Web provide an easy and immediate way for businesses to start using Web conferencing. Upfront investments in IT skills and resources are not required," she added.

"Users are able to initiate meetings on the fly and solve problems more readily than by trading phone calls and in some cases e-mail. Documents can be jointly reviewed and edited. Shared presentations and applications can help to enhance discussions."

And, with a web conference, those discussions can range as far as time and technology allows, from sales forecasts to product demonstrations to the number of counterfeit drugs currently flowing through the world's markets.

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