Last week, my MSN Messenger client suddenly popped out a message
inviting me to upgrade my software and begin swapping instant
messages with my Yahoo buddies. Federated instant messaging at
last! Great news - if only I had any Yahoo buddies. It will be even
greater news on a personal level once Microsoft adds AOL's AIM into
the mix (I have a lot of buddies on that instant
messaging platform), but right now it is just MSN and Yahoo.
As a big-time instant messaging user, I should have been
celebrating this giant step forward in instant messaging
interoperability. Instead, I became troubled by a similar but major
business communications problem. There has been so much speculation
lately about which company will eventually be the dominant unified
communications player – Cisco or Microsoft – that attention has
been diverted from a far more pressing problem affecting business
users today: federated presence.
Presence software, a key component of unified communications,
collects information about an end-user's availability status and
communications capabilities. If we are using the same presence
system, it tells me whether my buddy is available to chat and lets
me know the best way to reach him. Is he using a SIP phone, e-mail,
a softphone? Is he on instant messenger at a particular time? Does
he have web collaboration or videoconferencing enabled on his
system? Meanwhile, presence tells my buddy the same information
about me. Presence is intended to make that annoying game of phone
tag a thing of the past.
Getting disparate presence products to share information
bi-directionally – so-called federating – is key to giving this
technology the traction it needs to become a ubiquitous
communications tool that makes life easier for network managers and
end-users alike. Federated presence would remove borders between
end-users and clients, co-workers located in different branches, or
even family members and friends in different locations.
Imagine a world where Verizon talked only to Verizon, Sprint to
Sprint, Cingular to Cingular, and so on. As it stands today,
individual products work in these kinds of proprietary silos,
allowing end-users to communicate exclusively with other end-users
on the same system.
Moreover, as presence is extended to such things as mobile
phones, documents and e-mail, federation will become even more
critical.
Fortunately, there is a great incentive to make these products work
as harmoniously as the phone system. According to Yankee Group, the
total voice market today is about $18bn, and there are 350 million
business desktops out there. Assuming only $3 per client, that
would translate to $1bn. Once you add in e-mail, unified messaging,
videoconferencing, mobility and the like, the total market for
unified communications – which uses presence software as its glue –
has the potential to be $30bn or more.
"For presence to be successful, all of the products have to be
able to communicate with each other," said Yankee Group's Vanessa
Alvarez. "Network managers are the people who would complain about
the products not communicating with each other. It would take a lot
of custom development to make the products interoperable."
Suppliers such as Cisco, Microsoft, Avaya, Alcatel, Interwise,
Mitel, Siemens and Nortel offer presence products, but none of them
can currently share information with the others out of the box.
However, all of the major presence suppliers are meeting
regularly at the SIP Forum's SIPIT (Session Initiation Protocol
Interoperability Tests) events to get their products to federate –
share information bi-directionally – and, for the most part, there
has been steady progress toward federation among the group.
According to Cisco, which earlier this year demonstrated
interoperability between IBM Lotus SameTime 7.5 and Cisco Unified
Call Manager 5.0, the technology to make disparate presence
platforms interoperable already exists because the products are all
inheritently SIP-enabled. It is up to the individual suppliers to
choose whether they want to participate in interoperability testing
and bi-directional sharing of presence information and finally flip
the switch.
"It is not a technical question, it is a business question. A
lot of what people want is available today," said Cisco's Cullen
Jennings, who is an area director for an IETF working group that
focuses on SIP/SIMPLE and interoperability. "The problem is whether
the suppliers want to do this."
As it stands today, Microsoft is creating a stalemate when it
comes to ubiquitously federated presence. Microsoft is
participating in interoperability testing, but the company plans to
stop short of bi-directional information sharing. When it comes to
sharing data with Microsoft's presence, Jennings said, it is "check
in but do not check out."
Considering that there are two camps forming right now, one
around Cisco and the other around Microsoft, Microsoft's
cooperation in federating its product so that it shares information
bi-directionally with other products is critical for network
managers and for ease of use among end-users.
"Microsoft has more or less said that at this point, all point
data should be fed up to their systems, and that should be the only
source of presence data," Jennings said.
Microsoft's angle on federating makes sense for Microsoft, but
it is not one that promotes market harmony. According to Microsoft,
all presence identities would do best if based on Active Directory,
a strategy intended to make the lives of network managers easier
because each end-user carries that identity with him wherever he
goes throughout a company's vast network. By contrast, each time a
new device such as another PBX is installed on that same network
and uses a different identity for each end-user, it creates a
management headache because more and more identities need to be
juggled.
"The way IT people want to look at presence is that they want it
to be deeply associated with each end-user name at the company, and
they do not want to end up with multiple identities," said Zig
Serafin, general manager of Microsoft's Unified Communications
Group. "Just like I have a single e-mail account, network managers
want end-users to have a single presence account."
Do you have an opinion about how federation should work and
about the progress the presence suppliers have made toward making
their products interoperable? How important is federating to your
organisation? Let us know your opinion by writing to me at
amitchell@techtarget.com. Or visit our news page and cast your vote
in our unified communications poll.