E-Pro: Storming the Sametime Fortress
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Most of the fearless readers of this article have either chosen Lotus Instant Messaging (previously Lotus Sametime) or are heading down the treacherous path of choosing and evaluating an enterprise instant messaging (IM) system. (Note that I am not including the option of Lotus Web Conferencing, as it is not necessarily the focus of this article. It is a complementary piece that contains another list of competitors for that market.) Choosing the right IM package for the business has become choosing your favorite form of business torture. It can either make or break the size office you will be getting very soon and/or determine how far away from the office your parking space is.
With numerous smaller players existing in the enterprise IM market, it was only a matter of time before the large public instant messaging providers entered into the race to gain a foothold and momentum (I prefer calling it catching up since Lotus Instant Messaging holds such a strong lead) into the enterprise instant messaging market. The three major public providers, Yahoo!, AIM (AOL Instant Messaging), and Microsoft have all announced attempts into the corporate market.
Take into account that the end user is familiar with the consumer product interfaces and the volume of IM that travels across the networks using these public providers; they launch a strong case in utilizing their new solutions. But IBM Lotus is the only one of these providers that does not have a public IM branding, giving them the edge and years of head start in enterprise integration. (see Quenching Your IM Thirst with Sametime-Ade in the May 2003 issue of E-Pro Magazine)
According to the September 2003 Osterman Research Semi-Annual IM Tracking Survey, the three providers I list above now show a 9.1% market ownership. Taking this a step further to include: recent announcements by Yahoo! and AIM for agreements with Rueters; the existing Microsoft Exchange IM (which will see some enterprises moving to the new Microsoft Live Communication Server); and the multi-carrier abilities of Jabber; the market penetration moves to an incredible 32.7%. There are other providers listed in the survey that are not included in this percentage. For example, Novell offers an enterprise IM solution that hasn’t quite taken hold in the market.
Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research, Inc. had the following to say when asked his overview from all the information he gathers in his IM surveys.
“The leading consumer IM providers -- AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo! -- are well positioned to gain substantial market share in the enterprise IM space. Each of these providers' IM systems is already used widely in the enterprise -- our tracking surveys show that each of these products has a presence in at least 50% of enterprises that currently use IM. Microsoft, in particular, may have an advantage in the enterprise space by integrating its new enterprise-grade IM offering with Microsoft Office, thereby expanding IM use beyond simple text chat and into true collaboration. Although Lotus still holds a substantial lead among those enterprises that have already established a corporate IM standard, that market share has been under assault over the past 18 months.”
I compiled a comparison of the capabilities with some general information on each provider, as well as some of the drawbacks. You can go to http://www.e-ProMag.com for a graphical comparison chart for easier observations of the differences. These vendors were chosen based on their current marketshare of the public IM market and competitive capabilities they offer. A brief overview of the product, followed by important features and drawbacks were listed for each one. Microsoft is the newest offering and had the most limited information available at the time this article was written.
YAHOO! Business Messenger
Yahoo! calls their enterprise release “business-class instant messaging bringing the best features of free public IM, with business-class security and administrative control.” This is exactly the type of marketing effort I discussed above. They claim with over 30 million public IM users of their network, they needed to build a business class product.
Features include:
Encryption of traffic through SSL
Centralized management by an administrator
Logging & archiving
Namespace provisioning
Integration to leading portal software and directory providers
Webcam
Macintosh support, web messenger and mobile devices (version 2.0)
Current drawbacks:
Reliance on a hosted model
Lack of full integration with Notes client and presence awareness
No developer API for application integration available
Yahoo! took a strong position by changing the actual product name soon after it was released. To show their desire to capture the small to medium business market, the name changed from Enterprise Messenger to Business Messenger.
The approach taken is that Business Messenger is a hosted environment with two options. The service is either entirely outsourced to Yahoo! or portions may be installed onsite. Having a server onsite allows encrypted file transfers and messages since it would sit behind the company firewall. The architecture relies on J2EE servlets that run and act as connectors from the enterprise IM client to your IT services group. Presence and message routing are handled by Yahoo! in it’s data centers.
Yahoo! also allows authentication from corporate directories for auditing or regulatory compliances. With the ability of Domino to serve LDAP compliant directory services, username integration could be fairly simple. While Domino wasn’t listed as an optional directory on their website, other LDAP servers were.
Policies are possible to provide certain features per user or group. The administrator may restrict all or individual features for security, bandwidth or usage reasons. Lotus Instant Messaging only offers global setting in regards to things like the ability to perform file transfers. No granular policies are available. Auditing and reporting are also done through J2EE servlets. A hidden feature regarding logging is if the logging server goes offline for any reason, the local client buffers the logs until it can move them to permanent storage on the server.
Recently, in late Oct 2003, Yahoo! moved the Business Messenger group to the free consumer sales and marketing division and laid off people from the previous enterprise solutions division. (see http://www.news.com/2102-1032_3-5100685.html for more on this story) This had no reported impact on services or new sales offered. It was stated by Yahoo! to be an organization move only.
Microsoft Office Live Communications Server (LCS) 2003
Microsoft finally brought LCS to production in Oct 2003 after much talk, press and anticipation. The new LCS brings many features along that were nowhere to be found in the Exchange IM product that was offered previously. But overall it turned out to be a letdown in manageability, deployment and features in this first release.
The enforcement of having Windows 2003 servers to support LCS gives other vendors the immediate edge. Most enterprises are not nearly that aggressive in upgrading or deploying that new a server version from Microsoft. You must also deploy the Messenger 5.0 client to perform the basics of IM with LCS.
Features include:
Utilizes the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) for administration
Permissions are managed from the Active Directory from a new LCS tab that is placed on the property pages
Archiving for all IM traffic (requires SQL server)
Kerberos and NTLM authentication – except there is a new documented issue with current passwords having to be at least 14 characters long
TLS encryption of IM traffic
Integration into Microsoft Outlook 2003
Rich text support
Current drawbacks:
Only Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000 or later client operating system required
Servers must be members of the Windows domain
Third party management tools must be purchased to fill gaps in the core product
Even with SIP and SIMPLE support, you could only use the Messenger 5.0 client in tests performed by eWeek Magazine.
As enterprises consider moving towards upgrading to Windows Server 2003 and more features are added to the core product, the integration with Microsoft Office and Outlook could make it more attractive. However other drawbacks are immediately recognizable.
The reliance on Active Directory, or LDAP, could be an immediate show stopper for those companies that have not progressed from older Windows domains. Or, have not consolidated all users into an LDAP container with the proper naming, groups and structure to manage and assign policies correctly. Also those companies that are years away from a Windows 2003 migration will find that they cannot run the product.
Jabber Extensible Communications Platform (XCP) 2.7
In September 2003, Jabber released version 2.7 of the XCP messaging platform with some new features and benefits. Jabber and Lotus Instant Messaging are currently the only ones that have a web interface that allows for more flexibility and less need for client deployment. They currently claim over 4 million seats deployed.
You might ask why I chose to include them in this comparison. Well, I wished to have a baseline, growing company that works with numerous public providers through a custom interface. This left quite a few ‘consolidation clients’ that were able to offer this. But Jabber has built their own server architecture, based upon XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), an open standard for interoperable messaging systems, and linked it into public providers also. I feel that they are a good definition of where the market needs to head to gain even more momentum in turning IM from a commodity into a business critical function. XMPP is expected to be ratified by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) soon as an Internet standard for IM.
In an October 2003 press release from the company, Don Bergal, VP of Business Development for Antepo, talks about how the open standards of XMPP is leveraged by stating, “The XMPP-to-SIMPLE gateway extends XMPP networks to other relevant and leading players in the marketplace. For example, it interoperates with IBM’s Lotus SameTime, the largest enterprise IM installed base.”
Features include:
Sending IM transcripts to other users
Alternate user name display for LDAP fields
Modular installer
Administrative broadcasts
Client-Server version locking: Administrators can lock the server to enforce the use of a specific client or clients, ensuring that all users have a specific client and/or version
Integration of weather, news and sports into the client available
Current drawbacks:
The client is more plain that the other
three public providers, but does offer custom views
No easy administration interface
Native message log analyzing is through
external tool as it is stored in a flat text file
On November 11, 2003, Jabber announced
it has also partnered with Akonix (as was mentioned about AOL previously)
to provide a unified reporting and compliance ability to track communications
internally on Jabber and across the gateway to the public networks. This
move lets enterprises secure, manage and archive all IM traffic to not
only internal employees, but also external partners and customers.
AOL Enterprise Gateway
Launched
in 2002, AOL entered the market with an interesting beast of a product.
Imagine taking all the wonderful features of their public IM and
wrapping security, auditing/ reporting and directory integration into it.
It makes for a strong competitor and attacker of the Lotus IM market.
The gateway itself was developed by Facetime (who offers their own
product, under the name IM Auditor, with similar capabilities). It
secures and monitors communications between users, can intelligently route
traffic and even restrict who can access the public network. An API
allows developers to exploit the IM network into their applications.
AOL
also prides itself on being able to make the claim that the public network
processes 2 billion messages per day. This includes over 2 million
unique users daily. Both of those statistics are further backed by
AOL stating it has not had a full service outage in the company’s six
year history of offering the service, unlike Microsoft.
One
feature that stands out for this gateway service is the intelligent routing
capability. If you choose to let your employees utilize the public
IM network through policies, the gateway is smart enough to realize that
traffic destined for another internal user should remain behind the gateway
and it is not sent to the Internet. This allows for internal communications
to continue if access to the public Internet is lost.
Features include:
Ability to block signing on
User/group policy management
Use audio features
Send and receive buddy lists
Send and receive files
Access the public IM network
Receive alerts
Map external IM names with directory names
Encryption through S/MIME
Support for federated authentication
Rich text client
Current drawbacks:
A portion is still hosted
AOL
has recently been signing agreements with third parties to provide more
functionality and features. Akonix was partnered with to bring advanced
corporate messaging capabilities and compliance features in Oct 2003. It
gives the ability to track IM traffic in real-time based on keywords, phrases
or even time of day. It is a solution for behind the enterprise firewall
that is managed through the Microsoft Management Console (MMC).
A news report from CNET News on Oct 31,
2003 states that AOL is pulling back from selling directly to enterprises
and instead is focusing on partnering with established vendors like Reuters.
Lotus Instant Messaging
With
beginnings years ago, Lotus entered the IM arena with Sametime, before
changing the name to Lotus Instant Messaging in 2002. Lotus has the
foresight before the push to have it in the enterprise existed. It
was offered as an integrated and stand-alone version in the first releases
until Lotus realized the powerful product they had and continued to evolve
collaboration by offering ease of developing solutions that utilized Sametime.
That is where they made such strong inroads in market penetration
mentioned in surveys and articles about it being the current champion.
Carl
Tyler, Chief Technology Officer of Instant Technologies, a 2003 Lotus Beacon
and Apex Readers Choice Award for it’s instant messaging solution, offered
an excellent overview of where he sees Lotus IM in the marketplace.
“IBM
Lotus Instant Messaging is facing a number of new challengers in the Corporate
Instant Messaging market right now with major challenges coming from the
traditional consumer based IM players such as Yahoo and AOL. Yahoo
and AOL obviously have experience in building systems that can scale to
huge numbers, but do they have the experience working with traditional
corporations? AOL and Yahoo are still building a sales force, and
skills to sell to this type of customer, and it’s not something that can
be built overnight. Where IBM Lotus has the biggest lead over the
new competitors is in their toolkits, toolkits for 3rd parties
to develop applications for the enterprise versions of Yahoo and AOL are
slim if not non-existent, as people use Instant Messaging in their day
to day business they realize that integration of presence and awareness
are the components that make Instant Messaging much more powerful and useful
than just chat. IBM Lotus should not sit idly by however, where AOL
and Yahoo do have a huge advantage is the ability to integrate with their
existing consumer base, allowing for easy corporate to consumer communications,
IBM Lotus can make an effort to educate the customer though, these corporate
to consumer conversations are often not encrypted, there is no guarantee
the person you’re chatting with “BillBobLogger37” is actually who you
believe it is. So IBM Lotus must be sure to let corporations know
that there are other solutions that can be used to provide conversations
with consumers via websites etc. using the toolkits that are available
for IBM Lotus Instant Messaging. If IBM Lotus plays this right, AOL
and Yahoo entering the market can help validate their offerings, and show
that much of what is promised for the future is available today.”
Features include:
Encrypted messages
Authentication
File Transfer
Pulling of public groups from the directory
source
Administrative broadcasts
Notes client and database integration
Presence alerts
Current drawbacks:
Lack of a rich text client support found
in the other packages
Connection to AOL does not include namespace
mapping
No ‘out of the box’ auditing and archiving
No ability for user and group policies,
settings are global
The ability to use audio and video relies
on a separate browser window launching and is not available on the integrated
Notes client version
I asked Ed Brill, Manager, Lotus Competitive
Project Office for Lotus Software his final thoughts of where Lotus Instant
Messaging will continue to offer the best advantage to enterprises as the
battle wages on. He responded by saying, “Today, instant messaging
is viewed mainly as a stand-alone tool. In the next few years, though,
as web services becomes a more prevalent model, and the need for instant
communication increases, IM will morph into a component of the overall
collaboration infrastructure. Think back to when e-mail first was
widely adopted by businesses -- it was used primarily for interpersonal
communication. As APIs and standards emerged, e-mail became the core
business communications engine. IM is in for a similar evolution
-- from stand-alone, person-to-person chats -- to becoming an adjunct to
the traditional asynchronous messaging, embedded within business processes
and systems.”
One feature introduced in Domino 6.5 to
slow the intrusion, was the tighter integration of Lotus Instant Messaging
and the Notes client (see Notes/Domino 6.5 Preview in the Sep 2003
issue of E-Pro Magazine). Awareness indicators come standard in the
mail template for Notes and iNotes and can easily be placed into databases
through simple design changes.
The current drawback of the integrated
Lotus Instant Messaging into the Notes client is the lack of functionality
it provides compared to the actual Lotus Instant Messaging fully installed
client. While new features may be introduced in later versions, currently
such items as file transfer, multi-user chat capabilities and presence
alerts are not possible.
However, Domino also has the ability to
serve it’s directory as LDAP so the other providers can take advantage
of this. Lotus also introduced Lotus Workplace features into the
Notes 6.5 client. This allows easy deployment on applet or HTML based
chat from some of the providers to be integrated into the welcome page
of the Notes client, also web applications.
Conclusion
All the major public vendors are working
with everyone, everyone but each other on a regular basis, to stitch together
the tens of millions of IM users.
AIM signed an agreement with Reuters to
share users and add names to buddy lists
IBM Lotus signs a similar arrangement with
Rueters
MSN then follows in the same arrangement
with Rueters
Akonix as a vendor has it’s own agreements
with the public IM providers and now AIM and Jabber.
This is increasing the need and
demand for corporate IM standards. The difficulty arises when certain
departments in your company are finding that their partners, suppliers
and customers are using numerous IM packages. Therefore, no standard
will work for everyone. IM is fast becoming a line item in 2004 budgets
and providers are scrambling to be the ones to capture those funds.
As Lotus builds the barricades to thwart
the attack of IM providers, they continue to deliver an integrated, behind
the firewall solution. Adding to that the vision of automated IM
bots that interact with applications and data stores, componentizing of
IM into the Lotus Workplace strategy and ease of awareness integration
that came in the Domino 6 products, Sametime continues to prove why it
is the leader and “king of the castle” in enterprise IM.
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On Sunday, February 1st, 2004 by Chris Miller
