IBM To Microsoft: Game On!

Talking about IBM's Sametime product is like talking about your favorite Chevy or Ford  pickup truck. It might not be pretty, but it hauls a load and gets you to where you want to go. And that’s important (stability, reliability, scalability, etc.). IBM has been the long-entrenched leader for many, many years when it comes to enterprise IM and on-premise web conferencing. There might have been some more popular products for e-learning (e.g., Centra) but by-and-large, when it came to generalized infrastructure, Sametime was the platform to beat in the enterprise software market for real-time collaboration.

Unfortunately, there was that dark period a few years ago where IBM took their eyes off the entire Lotus franchise and cast doubt about the future of the brand and associated products while it became enamored with Workplace and portal-everything. While many of the strategy gaps and management malaise concerning Notes and Domino have been alleviated over the past year or so, attention to Sametime has only recently become a focus point for IBM’s efforts concerning real-time communication (RTC).

Since 2003, IBM essentially left the battlefield when it came to RTC, allowing Microsoft to move through the market almost at will. For some time there has not been a vision or coherent strategy around the convergence of audio/video/data conferencing, instant messaging, IP telephony/VoIP, presence, e-mail, and voice mail – what many people are categorizing as Unified Communications today. There have been product updates to Sametime for sure, but no strategic vision and architectural framework or partner business model until recently that paralleled what Microsoft (and even some communication vendors) have been talking about concerning “convergence”.

And that is what’s most important about this release of Sametime. V7.5 signifies IBM’s return to competing with Microsoft when it comes to unified communications. While not a perfect release (I wish it did more to modernize the back-end), it is an initial volley. The question now is whether it is too little too late and whether the rest of the work needed to be delivered happens in a timetable that satisfies client needs and market dynamics.

What I like:

• The general emphasis on this release deals with client interfaces and the user experience. To be kind, Sametime was not a very compelling front-end compared to people’s modern user experience with clients from public IM network providers. While this seems like a trivial point, it is incredibly important in terms of user adoption and the ability of people to tailor their IM client around their personal work and lifestyle preferences.
• The user experience for web conferencing is also dramatically improved. It is easier to create a conference, add slides, obtain meeting information, co-browse web pages, poll participants and visualize polling results (to outline a few new/enhanced features).
• The unified IM client also has an extensibility model based on Eclipse so any developer familiar with the Eclipse plug-in model can start viewing the Sametime client as a platform for next-generation real-time applications. I think this is a significant point of differentiation (given my earlier post) where Microsoft’s application model seems to lack cohesiveness. IM client as application platform” presents interesting opportunities for developers to build community-oriented and social networking-based applications.
• There are also interesting cognitive features in this release around chat history. Thinking of chat as a persistent conversation rather than a temporal back-and-forth dialog that has no long term relevance is the right viewpoint. Persistent “communication spaces” have some intriguing applications (Parlano has been presenting the idea of persistent group messaging to the market with their own solution that runs on top of Microsoft LCS). Indeed, IBM has already demonstrated its own applications on top of Sametime related to expertise (“SkillTap”) and social networking.
• The revamped client also does a good job at location awareness as well (although based on IP address which is not always accurate).
• Perhaps the most significant point of differentiation though is how IBM is dealing with the audio and video aspects of unified communications. Where Microsoft has aggressively pursued implementation of native support for IP Telephony itself, IBM has instead defined an integration framework (Sametime Provider Interface) for partners such as Avaya and Premiere to plug into. Any click-to-call behaviors leverage this interface to integrate with IP Telephony, PBX or conference bridge. That will be attractive to enterprises preferring not to cede their communication infrastructure to Microsoft versus investments in Cisco, Avaya, and others. IBM is committing to some peer to peer audio though but it’s unclear how aggressive they will be compared to vendors such as Skype and others that continue to raise the bar on that model.
• The integration with Google is another aspect of the announcement I like, in part because it acknowledges that any vendor that wants to position itself as the overall presence management framework for the enterprise has to be open to other connection mechanisms (in this case XMPP) rather than being somewhat stubborn about presence only being defined by SIP/SIMPLE.

What Remains A Concern:

• Integration with Microsoft Office: IBM has been in the press regarding how it will integrate with Microsoft products (perhaps via smart tags and such). But there needs to be much more information provided along with specific patterns of integration on the client as well as with SharePoint.
• Priority: IBM still lags behind Microsoft in terms of thought-leadership as well as continued execution in this area. I know the internal Sametime team is reinvigorated but it remains unclear how much overall management commitment this area will receive given IBM’s Workplace message and portal-centricity.
• Modernization of the back-end: There is a lot of work to be done to move to standard protocols (e.g., native SIP to the client, retirement of the old T.120 code). If you look at how far someone like Adobe has come with Breeze, it makes you wonder about the ability of IBM to rapidly deliver and keep pace. If not soon, enterprises might look to Adobe as the Microsoft alternative for on-premise web conferencing.

So again, lots of Q&A to follow-up with IBM on as well as packaging my analysis into a report also due out and again working with my fellow Burton Group analyst, Irwin Lazar in this space.