IBM Aims to Burst Microsoft's Office Communications Bubble - Page 2

Increasing stakes in the unified communications game

Expect to see more of this kind of one-upsmanship in the weeks and months to come as enterprise software and telephony vendors seek to differentiate themselves in the emerging unified communications (UC) and real-time collaboration markets.

Now that enterprise desktops and datacenters are saturated with enterprise communication applications -- like e-mail, instant messaging, Web and video conferencing and document collaboration -- top-tier vendors are looking for ways to edge out the competition. Increasingly, that's meant a focus on convincing enterprise and small- and mid-sized businesses (SMB) to invest billions in additional software that ties all these disparate communication applications together.

"Industries need something to latch on to, and they need to have a theme," Matthias Machowinski, an analyst at Infonetics Research, said in an interview with InternetNews.com. "And right now, unified communications is that theme."

"IBM's announcement today fits into the overall trend we're seeing where most of these vendors are working on integrating all these different products to one-up the competition," Machowinski said.

At the moment, Microsoft is the space's undisputed leader, according to Gartner's oft-cited Magic Quadrant report, followed by Cisco due in large part to its $3.2 billion acquisition of WebEx in March, along with Nortel, IBM, Alcatel-Lucent and Avaya.

Despite all the attention and investments these companies have made, businesses only spent about $363 million on unified communications applications in 2006, according to Infonetics Research. However, the market is expected grow between 25 percent and 30 percent each year through 2010, making it a roughly $700 million sector within three years.

While e-mail and instant messaging have become almost indispensable in the enterprise, Machowinski said the vast majority of IT organizations have yet to integrate the two. For instance, workers could be making voice-over-IP phone calls by clicking a link within their Outlook client, he said.

Similarly, IT departments could enable users to unify their IM accounts -- from public services like those from AOL, Yahoo or MSN -- into one corporate-sanctioned identity, although this happens only rarely in businesses today. Still fewer offer workers the tools to incorporate all these fancy document collaboration or Web and video conferencing applications into their existing workflows.

That's a reality that Microsoft, IBM and the rest of the UC pack will be struggling to overcome with the release of their new platforms. At the same time, naturally, they'll also be aiming to overcome each other.

Still, IBM's strategy has its doubters. Machinowski, for instance, said IBM's effort to integrate its applications with Sametime -- just as competitors have done in Microsoft Office or Google Apps Premiere -- strikes him as a ploy unlikely to have a large pay-off for the company.

"To me, it's not of the essence," he said. "It's good functionality and makes sense but I wouldn't consider it the cornerstone of a UC strategy. In my mind, what really matters is how you combine the core communications processes like mobility, phone, video and messaging.