Old Market, New Tricks

In recent weeks Cisco Systems Inc. and Oracle Corp. have debuted products that compete—either directly or tangentially—with collaboration and communications software from established players IBM Corp., Armonk, N.Y., and Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Wash. and relative newcomer Google Inc., Mountain View, Calif. The question is, can these "upstarts" make any headway in such a mature market?

Oracle, Redwood Shores, Calif., used last month's Oracle OpenWorld show as the launch pad for Beehive, an integrated collaboration suite with e-mail, instant messaging, calendar, team workspace and other tools.

Oracle executives acknowledged that Beehive is hardly entering a "greenfield" market. "There are a lot of tools today for people to communicate and a lot of tools for people to coordinate their activities," said Chuck Rozwat, executive vice president of product development, in a press conference at Oracle OpenWorld.

Oracle's argument is that businesses today have to manage a hodgepodge of disparate collaboration and communication systems. "Integration is one of the major things that we could bring to the market that would make it easier for users and more efficient for administrators," Rozwat said.

It's understandable for Oracle to try to field a winning product in this space, said a report from Gartner Inc., Stamford, Conn. Collaboration services are increasingly being woven into applications, analysts Matthew Cain and Jeffrey Mann noted, and help drive sales of other infrastructure products like database and middleware software. And Oracle wants to check Microsoft's efforts to make Exchange, Office and SharePoint the default collaboration services for most companies, the report said.

But Oracle has been down this road before. The vendor had an e-mail and calendar application in the 1990s and today it sells the Oracle Collaboration Suite. Both failed to gain traction because of a lack of market differentiation, according to the Gartner report, and Beehive's odds of success aren't much better.

Oracle channel partners seemed dubious. "We're investigating [Beehive], see how it fits in the marketplace," said Tony Catalano, senior vice president at TUSC, a Lombard, Ill.-based Oracle reseller.

Cisco may fare better with its plans to tie together its Cisco Unified Communications, Cisco TelePresence and Cisco WebEx products into a single collaboration software portfolio. The integrated systems will help business users connect, communicate and collaborate from any application, device or workspace, according to San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco.

Brett Shockley, CEO of Minneapolis-based solution provider Spanlink Communications Inc., said the ability to offer an integration platform that brings together different applications through WebEx Connect gives him the ability to pre-package applications that better meet market needs.

"It creates an interesting framework to bring those applications together and add increased functionality," he said. Spanlink, for example, is building portal applications for customers based on its Solution Watch monitoring application and integrating unified communications into that portal. Creating a WebEx widget around that creates a workspace for people to collaborate when responding to events picked up by the monitoring solutions.

The established players in this space aren't sitting still, of course. Late last month IBM released Lotus iNotes Ultralite, a software download of the Notes client for the Apple iPhone that lets iPhone users check Lotus Notes e-mail and view contacts and calendars. "I expect that the iPhone will become another major enterprise PDA (besides the BlackBerry), so it is essential to have this Web mail access for Domino customers," said Andy Brunner, principal and owner of ABData Information Technology Consulting and Engineering, an IBM Lotus channel partner in Zurich, Switzerland, in an e-mail.

As for the growing competition, he said: "The collaboration market is controlled by Exchange and Domino and any other player will have a hard time finding new customers."