According to Tony Tsang, director for Greater China & Korea at WebEx, rising interest in external collaborative tools like web and audio conferencing has been driven by: increased comfort levels with doing business over the web, and the decreasing cost of bandwidth. WebEx, which provides web conferencing services, has grown rapidly in the US and Europe and is starting to establish a userbase in Asia Pacific.

Tsang said customers in Hong Kong typically use his firm's service to conduct meetings, training and e-learning, while in Korea, there is more advanced usage with companies using the service to interface with R&D teams and production teams from different locations. Disparate teams can share design documents and work together in real-time to ensure production goes to plan.

WebEx's services allow not only voice and video communications via the web but also some basic file sharing where users can edit and annotate working documents while in the conference.

IBM Hong Kong also has customers utilizing similar tools. Kevin O'Connell, senior consultant for IBM Software Group, noted this type of collaboration was popular among companies with geographically dispersed offices. Manufacturing companies like Conrad Electronic International, have offices in Hong Kong and facilities in China, said Alan Chan, SMB and channels manager for IBM Hong Kong's Software Group.

Chan said many SMBs with offices in both Hong Kong and the mainland use conferencing and file sharing tools to collaborate on computer-aided design (CAD) diagrams and files to improve the design-to-production process. Conrad is using Lotus Domino as the application development platform to integrate the administration, sales, accounting, quotation and email communications systems to help create further staff collaboration.