April 19, 2005
Opinion: Why The Enterprise Is Ready For Presence Technology
Instant Messaging has brought the missing component to the real-time equation because it is based on the notion of presence.
In the 1990's Internet entrepreneurs liked to talk about how "context" rather than "content" was the fundamental difference between online communities and traditional print magazines. But while the web delivered on its promise to deliver ubiquitous content, optimize transactions and transform commerce, it never really lent any sense of context to users' online experiences.
That's because the web was never designed as a real-time medium.
Today, most web-based applications and enterprise middleware systems are invocation-based, and thus follow a synchronous, request-response paradigm. Typically, a browser requests a particular service from a server by either sending a request message or performing a remote method invocation, then receives a reply in return. Not quite real-time, is it?
The Growth of Presence in the Enterprise
Instant Messaging (IM) has brought the missing component to the real-time equation. Because it is based on the notion of "Presence," that is, identifying the availability of a user on the spot, IM provides a natural framework for decoupled and asynchronous many-to-many flows between content subscribers and publishers. The first application of this publish-subscribe architecture is the well-known "buddy list," which allows users to subscribe to another person's current state of Presence, in order to be notified whenever such state is published.
Presence is really the "glue" that improves users' ability to communicate and interact in true real-time, tying together applications that previously lived in isolation. Presence is the dynamic extension of identity; it describes one or many states of an identity, exposing users' ability, means and overall willingness to engage in a transaction. Typically, a Presence engine will store and manage the connection status of users, their device and their capabilities.
It's easy to see how businesses might benefit from Presence.
Presence Lives in the Process
There are two obvious ways to improve corporate productivity: do more things in the same amount of time, or do the same amount of things in less time. The solution to improving either is to identify and eliminate the inherent delays in business processes. This is where Presence can have a tremendous impact. Typically, business process delays found in today's enterprises result both from inadequate access to missing information, and from employees' inability to locate and briefly interact with peers regarding such information.
By providing employees with the ability to reach a colleague using the most appropriate communication channel when new information they have subscribed to is published, Presence addresses this recurrent business challenge. Embedding Presence into the fabric of business processes has a tremendous potential to squeeze out wasted time: employees no longer request, they subscribe.
The bottom line: productivity improves; costs go down; customer responsiveness increases; competitive advantage results. CIOs should be sensitive to such benefits as they take on the enormous task of gleaning more efficiency out of their increasingly complex IT systems.
Presence on the Horizon
2005 is a turning point as Presence is coming to the enterprise in a new way -- particularly as it relates to enterprise-based IM.
Having already identified and controlled the use of consumer IM within their organizations, companies are now tackling the first phase of enterprise IM deployments, with pilots springing up left and right in both the SMB and large enterprise markets.
Why enterprise IM? Previously, the use of consumer IM meant that employees' presence and availability would be managed and hosted outside of corporate premises. With enterprise IM, Presence is coming behind the enterprise's firewall for the first time. Just as employees' identities and the company's data are managed inside, Presence is now being generated and extended within the corporate premises, and acting like a next generation of very intelligent dial-tone. Within a single company, Presence is capable of indicating real-time status changes for people and business processes. On a global scale, Presence can indicate critical status changes across a company's ecosystem of partners, suppliers and customers.
What does this mean for the future? Just as the second half of the 1990s was spent web-enabling corporate America, the second half of this decade will be spent re-engineering business processes around real-time enablement. In this evolution, office collaboration is just one angle. Mostly it's the fundamental shift from the request-response paradigm of web services to an era where user and application nodes subscribe once to events and state changes, and get notified in real-time.
A publish/subscribe-based state engine infrastructure will be required and needed as part of any enterprise or service-provider IT topology 5-10 years from now, with the ability to capture, aggregate and distribute state information becoming as essential as it is to store data or identity today.
As such, Presence and IM deployments today should not be positioned or envisioned within the same prism as email or other communication applications. Presence is not a communication application; Presence is an integral thread in the operating fabric of businesses large and small.
Maxime Seguineau is CEO of Antepo, Inc. which provides secure enterprise IM, collaboration and presence systems using the company's Open Presence Network platform. For more information visit .
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