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Messaging in the Next Millennium December 13, 1999 By Ron Anderson Integrated messaging and collaboration systems (IMCS) from Lotus Development Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Novell continue to define and control the corporate groupware market. These companies have established a long track record with their products; their wares are mature, reliable and capable, and have scaled to the point that large enterprises can deploy them with confidence. 
IMCS are mission-critical, and new products have a tough row to hoe to get a foot in the door. By many accounts, Netscape Communications Corp. is the latest IMCS wannabe vendor to adjust its strategy because of the difficulty of breaking into the corporate IMCS arena. Its SuiteSpot server and other similar standards-based systems are relatively new to the market, and the key Internet standards upon which these types of systems must be built are new or not yet available. It's tough to market products that compete on a feature-by-feature basis when the Internet standards upon which your features rely aren't available. At best, these vendors need to try to approximate standards based on drafts and, at worst, deploy standards-based products with some proprietary mechanisms. Neither alternative is particularly appealing.Despite repeated attempts to get Netscape involved in this article, we were unsuccessful. We can only speculate about the company's direction, especially in light of its recent buyout by America Online and its alliance with Sun Microsystems. Educated speculation depicts the Sun-Netscape Alliance concentrating on e-commerce and the ISP/ ASP (Internet Service Provider/Application Service Provider) message-outsourcing market, which may include some IMCS features, and abandoning the commercial IMCS market.
It is a big leap from the IMCS commercial market to the Unix/ Internet standards-based ISP/ASP arena. The Sun-Netscape Alliance appears to have a clear advantage with its iPlanet messaging server products already widely deployed. Assuming the IMCS vendors can get scalability and reliability right, two questions remain. First, are their rich feature sets attractive enough to open some space in the seemingly closed society of the ISP/ASP? Second, will companies, large and small, agree to outsource this business-critical function to ASPs? The next year should bring some answers. We remain skeptical that the commercial IMCS vendors can move into this arena with any big numbers. The shipping versions of the IMCS products from Lotus, Microsoft and Novell have been available for many months: Microsoft Exchange 5.5 since the fourth quarter of 1997, Novell GroupWise 5.5 since the fourth quarter of 1998 and Lotus Notes/Domino R5 since the first quarter of 1999. Until now, the vendors have been providing service packs (to fix known bugs) and supplying small enhancements. Lotus and Novell won't ship new versions of their IMCS products until mid-2000 or later. Microsoft released Beta 3 of Exchange 2000 in October and is shooting for a new version to be released in the second quarter of 2000.
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Meanwhile, Lotus, Microsoft and Novell are each looking at the ISP/ASP arena as the next big opportunity to expand their market presence. This space will be interesting to watch during the coming year. If the IMCS commercial vendors can iron out the scalability and reliability issues, their rich feature set and name recognition could lure ISPs/ASPs looking for a competitive advantage.
