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Sun Shines on IM
By Jim Balderston
Sun Microsystems plans to release a standalone
Instant Messaging Server sometime later this year, making the product
available separately from its Sun ONE Portal Server, which offers IM
capabilities. According to news reports, the new product will offer support
for the Linux operating system, as well as for Windows and Sun Solaris. A
formal release date and pricing have not been announced for the product.
Meanwhile, IBM announced earlier this month that it was adding IM
capabilities to its eServer iSeries products and
rolling it out on its iSeries Nation portal for customers and partners. The
Community Tools offering features a wide range of IM capabilities, including
saving of transcripts, polling, and the like.
Many in the enterprise IT sector believe that their
offerings — and the habits these offerings create in users — are far ahead of
the curve of the mere consumer user base. In most cases they are right. Indeed,
these people might ask, how many AOLers are
swapping business cards via infrared connections between their PDAs? Of course, the answer would be fewer than those in
the enterprise space. Grandma networks down at the bingo game, not at Comdex.
But there are exceptions to the rule, and here, with IM, we see one clearly.
The lesson to enterprise vendors and customers alike is simple: successful IT
deployments dovetail well with the established habits of those on whose
behalf the technology is being deployed.
Enterprise IM will certainly be a different animal
from the consumer version. It has to be. Not only will the user interface be
more “businesslike,” it will require many features that present consumer
offerings do not need and may never need. As it stands now, many enterprises
are banning IM as a communication tool because of potential legal issues.
Just as email has become a verifiable and court admissible paper trail, so IM
transcripts could become the stuff of lurid headlines and red-faced
executives. Giving the enterprise the ability to save and archive IM sessions
automatically will be a key feature. Disseminating rules and guidelines for
usage will ease IM into the enterprise; rules like “if you wouldn’t put it in
an email, don’t put it in an instant message.” So will security measures that
prevent IM from becoming a back door for various rogue applications out on
the network. But these issues are technical in nature, offering little more
than speed bumps in the eventual deployment of IM inside the enterprise
firewall. We suspect the resistance to adoption of this increasingly
ubiquitous — and useful — tool will largely be one of attitudes and
perception from IT admins and management nervous
about the newness of it all. Meanwhile users, well accustomed to managing
personal communications in real time with others, are denied a tool that
could make them more productive. Corporate IM sounds a lot like all those
side-doored PCs a decade or two ago.
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P2P for the Future
By Jim Balderston
Microsoft has unveiled a Peer-to-Peer Development
Kit for the Windows XP operating system that is designed to let both software
providers and enterprise developers build P2P applications on the XP OS.
Microsoft is also planning to develop P2P APIs for the XP platform. The
development kit is due out later this year. In a related move, Microsoft has
released 3°, a beta site offering P2P software ostensibly to the under-25 age
group for the purposes of communicating with friends. That effort came out of
a two-plus year internal effort that began when the project’s manager
approached Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer with the idea that they were missing
a key market segment — people under 25 — and the behaviors that they were
exhibiting online, i.e., being online
all the time. That project was eventually blessed by Jim Allchin
and now has the full backing of Gates and other Microsoft bigwigs. The 3°
software is available free. With 3° users can network with group of up to ten
people in a session, instant message, send various animations like “winks” to
each other, and share music in a virtual room.
Looking for coincidences here? You shouldn’t be. In
3°, Microsoft is laying the foundation for both a new base of users and new
product development for both inside and outside the enterprise firewall.
Consumers, especially young consumers that are clicking mice and messaging on
cell phones before they get their learning permits, are the next generation
of cubicle denizens that Microsoft will have to make more productive and — dare
we say it? — satisfied with their desktop environments.
Peer-to-peer networking has been a source of furious
debate, especially as it applies to the music industry and file swapping of
copyrighted material. But throughout that debate we have been optimistic that
P2P would find a place in both the consumer and enterprise markets that would
make this interesting technology useful and, yes, not liable to legal action.
The ability to share information and instant communications without central
servers offers unique opportunities to improve communications within and
without the enterprise. The fact that Microsoft is releasing an XP P2P
development kit would indicate that they expect the consumer habits formed in
junior high school, high school, and college to carry over into the
workplace. And we would argue that they will be shown to be correct in this
instance. The idea that software is developed to match existing user behavior,
and not the other way around, is a departure from the more traditional
technology- to-product pathway that expects users to adjust their behavior to
the tools at hand. We see P2P, like Instant Messaging, now
firmly ingrained in the next generation of enterprise users. We see the two
finding a great deal of confluence and overlap, as the next generation of
workers becomes the generation that really does need to work in “Internet
time.”
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Will the Sun Emerge from behind the
Market Clouds?
By Clay Ryder
This week Sun Microsystems held its annual Worldwide
Analyst Conference in San Francisco. As per the norm for such events, Sun
executives articulated Sun’s current state, its future roadmap, and its view
of the marketplace as a whole. Major themes presented were the future of Sun
software, its reaffirmation of the 32-bit IA as a UNIX platform, blade
servers, Linux, Project Orion, Trusted Solaris, N1, and services. In
addition, the company provided an exploration and explanation of Sun’s recent
financial performance.
Sun has always been more than a company; it is an
entrepreneurial way of thinking, a spirit of taking on big challenges,
solving big problems, and displaying a headstrong steadfastness despite the
temporary incursion of competitors, market changes, or even outright market
malaise. This essence of Sun has allowed it to weather several storms and
challenges to its survival. Nevertheless, in today’s market reality does this
mean that Sun will emerge victorious once again? The answer depends upon how
one defines victory. If one were to define victory as succeeding in the
markets one focuses on at present and having the ability to redefine the
market, its context and meaning, and the language used to describe success,
then yes, Sun will emerge victorious once again. But if were to apply a
different definition, i.e., the ability to articulate a clear encompassing
view of the systems marketplace as whole, including technologies that are
maligned if not despised by one’s point of view, this assessment of Sun’s
current success would have to be measured, and its future roadmap fraught
with a lack of clarity in its implementation.
Comparing the laundry list of markets and products
that Sun’s CEO stated it would not participate in with the presentations
given by the product groups and the CFO raises some interesting questions of
interpretation. While Scott McNealy in his usual charismatic style denigrated
HP, IBM, and Dell for being nothing more than outsourced components brokers,
he stated the commodity components such as disk drives, cabling, cabinetry,
etc. are part of Sun’s path to success. IBM’s Global Services was the butt of
CEO commentary, yet the CFO reported that services would represent approximately
30% of Sun’s FY 2003 revenue and contribute upwards of 40% of the operating
margin. But perhaps more illuminating about Sun’s future was the dearth of
discussion on UltraSPARC workstations replaced by a recycled expose on SunRay
= workstation, replete with predictions that in the near future everything
from dog collars to children and credit cards to automobiles will have
pervasive Java technologies embedded within. Then the network will be the
computer and tremendous bandwidth will bring all sorts of applications,
entertainment, and personal services to everyone on the planet through thin
client devices. Does this sound familiar? While this year’s event had a much
more rational presentation of its viewpoint with uncharacteristically minimal
cheerleading, the fact remains that Sun has chosen to focus on the medium and
larger enterprises and downstream customer electronics instantiations.
Although there is a likely a profitable business for a “right-sized” Sun
engaging these markets, the fact remains that Sun is conveniently overlooking
the hundreds of million of PC users, non-broadband pervasively connected
users, as well as printing and imaging, to name a few “systems” categories of
products. So, if Sun’s definition of the future comes to pass, it will reign
victorious. However, given the number of times we have been down this road,
we seriously question whether Sun will be a relevant vendor outside this well
defined, but limited marketplace. As such, will Sun truly be a systems vendor, or just a server supplier (with supporting
infrastructure software) to the business and governmental royalty that will
be increasingly beyond the reach of mere mortals? Only time will tell.
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Documentum Announces Integration
of eRoom Collaboration with Documentum Repository Products
By Myles Suer
Documentum announced this week the integration of
eRoom’s products, which it now owns after its acquisition of eRoom late last
year, with Documentum ECM product versions 4.2 and 5.0. The product called
eRoom Enterprise is designed to create a seamless, integrated experience
between content management and collaboration. eRoom
Enterprise offers unified content and collaboration services for project work
and content, including documents, email, Web pages, records, and rich media,
on both Intranet and Internets. eRoom enterprise is
now available. Pricing has not been announced.
Although this represents only the opening volley
from the eRoom acquisition by Documentum, we believe it begs the question as
to whether eRoom Enterprise will be accretive to Documentum’s bottom line or
just another set of features that mean little to driving the company’s
future. So far, content management and collaborative tools have been
separate, distinct, and somewhat lackluster markets. While Documentum cites
the use of eRoom by HP and Compaq during their merger for collaborating and
storing working documents, we are not convinced this on its own demonstrates
a new growth market born from this union. As a result, we are left asking if
the addition of collaborative tools changes Documentum’s fundamental value
proposition in its existing markets and whether anyone will care.
The central issue for Documentum is whether the
publication model a company uses to create content involves parallel or
serial collaboration. Unfortunately for Documentum, parallel collaboration is
not the way most business documents are created (outside of a few legal and
financial markets), nor is this likely to change in the near future. Given
limited synergy and market advantage for Documentum and limited application
and therefore appeal to users, we wonder if there were better places for
Documentum to have invested its resources. Granted this new product enhances
document management and should be a boon for organizations that require
committee style collaboration, we believe this is a limited market
opportunity. While Documentum may believe that eRoom is its ticket out of the
narrow world of document management and entry into the broader collaboration
arena, we do not believe this product announcement takes them there.
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