Microsoft's Move
Less than two weeks after AOL unveiled its Enterprise AIM Services strategy, Microsoft returned fire by unveiling its own partnership with FaceTime. Under terms of the deal, FaceTime designed gateway and management software known as MSN Messenger Connect for Enterprises. The gateway provides security, management, control, logging, auditing, and compliance capabilities for all MSN enterprise users. More than one hundred enterprise customers—from Alaska Airlines to Thomas Weisel Partners—already use FaceTime's software to manage their respective MSN instant-messaging systems, FaceTime says.
Microsoft also bundles instant-messaging software with Exchange Server 2000, the company's flagship groupware product. However, Microsoft's long-term IM strategy revolves around Greenwich, a forthcoming technology for Windows .Net Server slated to ship in late 2003 or 2004. According to Katie Hunter, a product manager at Microsoft, Greenwich will allow software developers to design IM and videoconferencing applications that run on Windows .Net Server.
Translation: Much in the way that it bundled Web browsers with Windows, Microsoft plans to corner the IM market by designing such capabilities directly into its next-generation server operating systems. Sources say Microsoft also plans to build communications links between Greenwich and the family of CRM software from its Great Plains Software division.
Meanwhile, roughly twenty-five corporate customers are beta testing Yahoo's enterprise IM software (see enterprise.yahoo.com/messenger/), which is expected to ship in the first quarter of 2003. Much like the corporate offerings from AOL and Microsoft, Yahoo's enterprise IM software includes logging and management services to achieve SEC compliance. Yahoo also offers close ties to BEA WebLogic and IBM WebSphere application servers within a customer site.
"All of the back-end messaging software runs on Yahoo servers that we maintain and manage," explains Ken Hickman, Yahoo's director of product strategy for the enterprise solutions division. "Customers install a server applet on their local application servers and use our client software to tie into the instant-messaging network."
The approach sounds similar to that of the ASP model, but Yahoo prefers not to be labeled as an ASP. "We're not hosting someone else's instant messaging software," points out Hickman "If there's a bug, we fix it."
The Tortoise Wins?
Even as AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo sprint into the spotlight, one of their "slower" rivals has gotten a jump on the corporate IM market. Indeed, IBM's Lotus Sametime has seven million corporate IM users worldwide. Sametime controls roughly 30 percent of the corporate IM market and is used by nearly two-thirds of the Fortune Global 100, according to Osterman Research. (Full disclosure: Lotus is a client of Osterman.)
Sametime has three core software components: The Sametime server, Sametime Connect client, and related developer tools. Much like ICQ's early approach to instant messaging, the Sametime server manages the flow of text messaging, audio, and video between the Sametime clients. An optional gateway links Sametime to other instant-messaging systems (though not AOL's, because the company refuses to open its network).
Celina Insurance Group uses Sametime to conduct sales meetings with remote sales staff, while agents use it for rapid communication with their underwriters, according to a spokesperson.
Meanwhile, savvy IBM partners are working to integrate IM with CRM and other applications. Agility Partners, for one, is beta testing intelligent agents that integrate IM with IBM WebSphere MQ, and XML. The software is slated for delivery in early 2003.
Best Practices for Corporate IM
While the corporate IM market is maturing rapidly, there are plenty of potential stumbling blocks.
For starters, businesses should establish a corporate IM security policy stating, among other things, that confidential company information should never traverse public IM systems.
Moreover, IT managers should configure corporate firewalls to block unapproved IM traffic. Check Point Software Technologies, for one, upgraded its firewalls last summer with IM scanning capabilities. The so-called Feature Pack 3 allows Check Point firewalls to inspect, control, and block instant messages from popular consumer services.
In recent months, several dozen IM worms have quietly found their way onto the Internet. The reason: Many IM clients include scripting capabilities. As a result, hackers can write Visual Basic or JavaScript code that forces IM clients to contact other clients, change user settings, or alter files.
On the desktop, Symantec recommends organizations enforce client-side IM settings. Refusing file transfers by default blocks an instant message from spreading malicious code.
The good news is that most current anti-virus software protects against such IM worms. And, unlike mainstream alternatives, most corporate IM software explicitly prevents rogue code from infiltrating a PC or server—just one more reason to move from consumer to corporate IM.
IM Standards Battle Drags OnThere’s a simple answer to instant messaging standards, but America Online isn’t quite ready to play ball. Generally speaking, IM platforms don’t work with one another because some IM vendors want to lasso their customers for life. However, pressure from Wall Street customers and other Fortune 500 heavyweights has forced many IM vendors to rethink their proprietary ways. In recent months, an IM standard known as SIMPLE (Session Initiation Protocol for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions) has gained support from IBM, Microsoft, and several smaller vendors. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which promotes interoperability on the Net, approved SIMPLE as a proposed standard in October 2002. Yahoo, meanwhile, says it’s taking a close look at SIMPLE as a means for promoting interoperability with public IM networks. And what about AOL? With more than 180 million IM users, AOL is in no rush to open up its IM network, citing the potential risk of Trojan horse software. A spokesman for the company says AOL isn’t focused on interoperability with Yahoo and Microsoft’s IM services at this time. —JP |
Joseph C. Panettieri ([email protected]) is editorial director at the New York Institute of Technology and a ten-year veteran of technology journalism.
