The growing popularity of instant messaging has created an opportunity for solution providers.Any VARs out there with teenagers know this: Instant messaging is a big deal. It also is a profit opportunity for channel companies.
IM can solve a lot of problems as enterprise IT managers look for ways to clear out spam-filled e-mail boxes, integrate far-flung project teams and offer more productive uses of their communications infrastructure. With IM, corporate staff can multitask and carry on multiple conversations, find out if someone is available to answer a quick question, and carry out other tasks that are cumbersome via e-mail or over the phone. VARs that aren't using IM yet should get more involved with it and understand the numerous integration opportunities IM offers. There are several trends to take note of and ways that VARs can leverage IM solutions.
Leveraging the Asterisk Ecosystem.
First, IM is becoming more of an open-systems play. IBM's Lotus Sametime is now based on open-source Eclipse software and offers plug-in features that VARs can use to provide information on whether users are busy, on the phone or available at their desk.
"IBM has worked with the Google Maps API so you can highlight everyone on your buddy list and show where they are currently located on the map," said Chris Miller, director of messaging and collaboration at Connectria, a St. Louis-based messaging integrator. Miller has clients who have taken open-source code integrations with their directory servers to show the organizational hierarchy of their IM buddies. "This cuts down the time they have needed to find someone for a particular job," he said.
The Jabber Software Foundation has also widened IM open-source opportunities, and many VARs have jumped in by selling IM servers and add-on features based on these open-source protocols. Jabber is a separate, private company that sells its own IM server appliance, which can be a good starting point for systems integrators that want to deploy their own enterprise IM solutions. "What Jabber has pioneered is the ability for interoperability, so you can use IM like your e-mail system," said Ashley Roach, a server product manager at Denver-based Jabber.
Second, IM networks are getting interconnected. The major public IM networks such as America Online's AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo's Yahoo Messenger, Microsoft's MSN Messenger and Google's Google Talk have connections to one another now, so that users on one system can chat with others without too much trouble. The private IM networks, such as Microsoft's Live Communications Server and IBM's Lotus Sametime, offer connections to various public IM networks. This means corporations can use IM to communicate with their customers and get replies faster than by using e-mail. E-mail is woefully inadequate for guaranteed message delivery and clumsy when it comes to conducting business in real time.
For these reasons, IM networks have become more mission-critical, which translates into more opportunities for VARs. These opportunities include storage management for archiving messages, compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley Act requirements and other corporate governance rules that require auditing client conversations.
"The financial sector has the biggest motivation for archiving and maintaining their IM records," said Arsenio Batoy, president of Optical Laser, an IM distributor in Huntington Beach, Calif. "And health care and energy are right behind financial and coming on strong. Archiving IM messages should be a part of every IT and HR [human resources] policy that addresses archiving e-mail messages. There is a pretty good business practice there, and you have the opportunity to sell lots of professional services and go beyond just selling [Microsoft] Exchange mailboxes."
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Third, IM is going beyond user-to-user communications and being implemented for one-to-many communications such as those between applications and users. As an example, when an overloaded router or a critical server goes down, software is written to automatically notify the help desk. In the past, IT support personnel used to rely on pagers for getting this information. A number of VARs are active here, deploying Lotus Sametime, Live Communications Server and Jabber-based solutions.
Finally, with increasing IM traffic comes a greater need to protect IM networks and prevent the medium from becoming yet another virus and malware transmission vector, and several vendors such as FaceTime Communications, Akonix Systems and Symantec have beefed up their partner programs to work with VARs to deploy these solutions.
"The deployment opportunities are endless," said Connectria's Miller. "The tools are out there, and there are ways to add your own branding to the IM software as well as provide back-end integration and add presence detection into many legacy systems."
David Strom is a St. Louis-based writer, speaker and consultant. He can be reached at david@strom.com.
