IBM’s Steve Mills (senior vice president of IBM’s software group) and Lotus VP Bruce Morse hosted a press conference earlier this week. At the event, they shared IBM’s strategy for Unified Communication and Collaboration (UC2).

What really caught my attention was how determined IBM Lotus has become to compete seriously in this market. IBM pledged at the event that they will be investing $1B in the Unified Communications market over the next three years.

“Unified communications refers to the combination of instant messaging, Web presence, VoIP, videoconferencing, and other ways workers can collaborate and communicate in real time through one user interface. According to IDC, the market will grow to $17 billion in annual revenue by 2011.”

IBM claims that it currently has 20 million stand-alone Sametime users, and is expecting an annual revenue growth rate, for Unified Communication, of 10% year over year for at least the next five years. We have seen a steady uptick in Sametime deployments at our customers as many companies are finally accepting Enterprise IM and Unified Communication as a business critical application.

I am also happy to note that IBM is reiterating the importance of business partners like Permessa in pursuing this strategy.

“IBM stressed the importance of third-party applications as part of its overall unified communications strategy and its competition with Microsoft.”

Technorati Tags: Unified Communication, UCC, Lotus UCC

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An interesting post on Adam Gartenberg’s blog is suggesting that Instant Messaging and in this case Sametime specifically, is starting to grow into the same rank of becoming a highly pervasive, mission-critical enterprise application that people cannot live without. In his post, Adam talks about a large Sametime customer that is scheduling a software upgrade on a Saturday at midnight.

“In their words, they started five years ago with a perception in the company that “IM is a toy,” and now have to schedule upgrades not only for the weekend, but at midnight on the weekend, in order to minimize disruption to their business.”

Multiple comments on the post suggest that this is not an exception either.

“We also struggle to find a decent upgrade window. Our other infrastructure teams find Sametime invaluable to communicate during the weekend/nightime when they are carrying out their own upgrades and maintenance. With many working remotely from home it would be difficult for them to operate effectively without it. We utilise an IP sprayer so that we can ‘remove’ a server from the virtual IP at a time to minimise downtime.”

“I’ve had a couple of customers say that they can handle e-mail being down for a few hours, but Sametime…? No way.”

“I rarely hear people call real-time collaboration ‘a toy’ any more. I believe most people are realising the benefits.”

The following comment makes the case for my second test, by using Sametime beyond its originally intended purpose.

“I deployed Sametime for a Bank (not in the US) a few years ago, and they love it so much that sometimes when the branch offices can’t connect to the main iSeries (for Banking transactions) they almost make transactions using Sametime.”

Just as email has become a reliable (and costly) tool of convenience for file sharing, Sametime due to its real-time nature is starting to be used for other unintended and perhaps even unsanctioned transactions.

This puts pressure on corporate IT to manage IM just like any other mission-critical application in the enterprise, which includes H&A monitoring, usage reporting and policy enforcement. Is your company ready for this?

See also: Enterprise IM is growing up, Enterprise IM is growing up, cont.

Technorati Tags: Sametime, IM mission-critical, enterprise IM

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“Sametime is a feature-rich environment for network-based collaboration and conferencing. It consists of the Sametime Server and client-based Sametime Connect software. Users can message each other via Sametime Connect or a Web browser, or from within Lotus Notes. Sametime Connect also can be launched directly and easily from within Microsoft Office and Outlook. All these points of entry worked well in the lab.

Sametime’s messaging interoperated seamlessly via IBM-supplied gateways with AIM, GoogleTalk and XCP.

We unreservedly and heartily recommend IBM Lotus Sametime for IM in a corporate setting. It is feature-rich, intuitive to use, highly scalable and platform neutral.”

Strangely – Microsoft opted not to participate in the review.

Technorati Tags: Sametime, Enterprise IM

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In a press release published last week, Gartner forecasts that IM will become the medium of choice for voice, video and text chat by the end of 2011.

For many knowledge workers, instant messaging (IM) is as critical as having access to a telephone or to e-mail and enterprises that haven’t already done so should start incorporating IM into their critical business processes immediately, Gartner said today. Gartner predicts that by the end of 2011, IM will be the de facto tool for voice, video and text chat with 95 percent of workers in leading global organisations using it as their primary interface for real-time communications by 2013. The worldwide market for enterprise IM is forecast to grow from $267 million in 2005 to $688 million in 2010.

The analyst firm further predicts that predominant consumer IM services such as AOL, Yahoo! and MSN Messenger will be replaced by behind-the-firewall Enterprise IM solution that provide secure and reliable communications within the enterprise while connecting to the public networks through monitored federation services. During the transition, Enterprise IM is expected to grow from it current 25% to 100% penetration within the next four years.

Gartner also touches on some of the issues surrounding security and compliance that are consistent with the recommendations I made in a previous blog post.

Technorati Tags: Gartner, Forrester, Enterprise IM, instant messaging, sametime, lcs, IM hygiene

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Notes 8 is built on Eclipse and offers, in addition to the fresh new look, many exciting new features such as: tight integration with Sametime, a RSS reader and a number of built-in productivity applications for documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

Technorati Tags: lotus notes, domino, eclipse, notes8beta, sametime

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This feature was first mentioned last summer with the pre-announcement of Sametime 7.5 amongst a slew of many other important enhancements to the product, including the gateway to public IM networks.

Perhaps one of the reasons that I may have missed this before is the fact that the integration option is not part of the default installer. You must actually read the release notes to find the specific installation instructions. Why IBM chose to exclude this feature from the standard installer is a mystery to me.

Once installed, Sametime offers integration with Word, Excel and the likes through Smart Tags. User can easily initiate chats within a document or spreadsheet if a name matches a corresponding Sametime user. What’s even more interesting though is the inclusion of a Sametime toolbar within Outlook. The toolbar integrates presence and instant chat capabilities right into email, contacts and calendaring.

Why do I think that this is a big deal? For one, MS-Office is ubiquitous in the enterprise and integrating Sametime is simply a requirement to effectively compete against Microsoft’s own LCS. Secondly, many companies are running Notes/Domino and Exchange/Outlook side by side. The integration with Outlook enables them to stay with one IM solution as users share the presence and awareness capabilities across both email clients. Lastly, Sametime is currently the most robust and complete enterprise IM and collaboration platform on the market. The wealth of new features that IBM managed to add into the 7.5.x releases helps in maintaining this leadership position.

Technorati Tags: Sametime, Lotus Notes, Outlook, Ms-Office

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Executive Summary:
For a decade and a half, IBM and Microsoft have waged an epic battle for control of enterprise email. That battle is now spilling over into instant communications, such as instant messaging (IM) and Web conferencing. IM is no longer just a way for kids to communicate — it is rapidly becoming an invaluable business tool. As enterprise architects (EAs) struggle to make IM reliable, secure, and auditable, they should focus not on point solutions but on a larger strategy for unified communications (UC) and real-time enablement of business applications and processes. While telecom and audio and video conferencing providers will all vie for a piece of the pie, IBM and Microsoft have laid out their visions and made a compelling case for why IM is within the domain of software infrastructure vendors. One thing is for sure: The convergence of collaboration and communication will drive down costs and drive up efficiencies as IM technology moves us closer to information workplaces.

Here are some key issues to consider when implementing IM as a core communication tool in the enterprise:

• IM is a real-time technology and users will be expecting sound performance and high availability. It is important to architect any enterprise IM deployment as a mission critical application and to provide the appropriate monitoring and reporting infrastructure.
• IM communication is either already or will soon be subject to the same regulatory and e-discovery rules as email. Make sure that your existing or planned compliance and archiving solutions support IM.
• Your users may already be using public IM networks, such as Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, etc. in a business context. Implementation of a corporate solution should target the consolidation of such public networks to achieve IT cost savings and manage compliance (see above).
• The full power of IM will truly unfold when integrated with other collaborative solutions such as email and VOIP. Be prepared for additional technology investments to expand IM presence into existing applications.

Technorati Tags: Enterprise IM, Sametime, LCS , IBM, Lotus, Microsoft, Forrester

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