Notes from Parlano and Wainhouse Webinar, Jan 20

Parlano and Wainhouse Research hosted a webinar today on The Business Case for Enterprise Instant Messaging. Parlano found that many of its customers were asking this question, and so engaged Wainhouse Research to prepare a vendor-independent perspective.

Key Points

Key take-aways from the session:

• Persistent messaging, whereby the conversation on a specific topic remains available for review and addition until no longer required is the next step beyond IM text chat.
• As IM is used for business processes, persistence of the conversation within the business process is the killer application.
• Other current tools, such as phone, email and Web/portal have strengths in specific communication situations, but weaknesses in play mean they do not offer persistent conversation capabilities for groups working in business processes.
• Smaller vendors, eg, Parlano, understand how the technology can be used in productive ways ahead of the larger vendors.
• There's no offline capability with Parlano's system, which renders it impossible for information workers to access the system when disconnected. This is a big deal, particularly during normal "down time" for information workers when travelling or staying away from the office. The historical information should be made available in an offline capability.

Bah Humbug!

I totally agree that within the enterprise IM world, persistence of information beyond the real-time exchange is important. But, in many ways, this is just another form of a threaded discussion forum, albeit with presence information and real-time notification added. A threaded discussion does the same thing ... who said what at what point in time, and in a shared form that all authorized individuals can access. Organizations have been doing this for *ages* with Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange Public Folders, eRooms, etc. So this isn't all that new, and current tools offer 80% of the value of Parlano's "new new thing".

Attendee Numbers

There was an average of 39 attendees for the duration of the Webinar. From 8.00am PST, here's the attendee stats:

• 8.00am … 29 attendees
• 8.05am … 31 attendees
• 8.10am … 35 attendees
• 8.15am … 40 attendees
• 8.20am … 45 attendees
• 8.25am … 42 attendees
• 8.30am ... 43 attendees
• 8.35am ... 42 attendees
• 8.40am ... 43 attendees
• 8.45am ... 44 attendees
• 8.50am ... 37 attendees (floor opened for questions)

Report Publication

The report will be available from Parlano on January 24.

Do you agree that persistence of real-time interaction is the next step of enterprise IM, or just Parlano's vision (yes, I know Instant Technologies believes it too)? Is this something really new, or as I've asserted, just a revamp of threaded discussion forums? Please drop me a line at michael.sampson@shared-spaces.com, or leave a comment below.

Comments

[Tim Latta]

I agree that on some level it is 2005's version of an archive of the latest technology. Being able to add at a future point is a small evolution of IM, but not the next killer feature/app.

Persistence of IM from one-one IMing to persisting chat sessions (ie; keeping one-one chat sessions 'open') or chat rooms that persist over time is an evolution of the medium that does have value.