The popularity of real-time communications among consumers has led startups Tribal Voice and uTok to develop new applications for corporate users, with business necessities such as security, message tracking and reporting added to the mix.
Lotus joins in
"Instant messaging can have a place in business use where you don't have other forms of conferencing, and the communications cost savings can be a huge factor for businesses," said Allan Marillier, a Unix programmer for a Toledo, Ohio, consultancy, who uses Tribal Voice's PowWow instant messaging software.
Tribal Voice, a developer founded by software utility pioneer John McAfee, next week plans to launch a business version of its free consumer PowWow offering for swapping messages on intranets.
PowWow for Private Networks offers users advanced capabilities such as Web site sharing, whiteboard discussion and file transfer, along with instant messaging. It gives administrators session logging, secure management and scalability and is priced at US$3,995 per server starting with 25 users.
"We see some good uses for (instant messaging) basically from the intranet and the extranet side," said Howard Jones, CIO of lawn equipment manufacturer Snapper Inc. Jones plans to implement an instant messaging system for customer queries and for internal technical support people who may not have access to a phone.
Support for protocol
Version 4.0 of PowWow for consumers, due in September, will support interoperability with other instant messaging clients, officials said.
MSN Messenger works with AOL's offering by incorporating the AIM buddy list and presenting all instant messages in the MSN Messenger client. AOL, however, responded defensively. Ann Brackbill, AOL senior vice president for communications in Dulles, Va., said Messenger's "unauthorized access ... is akin to hacking."
Additional reporting by Margaret Kane, ZDNN
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Meanwhile, squarely targeting the enterprise space, Lotus Development plans to announce enhancements to its Sametime messaging product line next week. Lotus released Sametime in beta in November of last year.
One enticement to corporate buyers may be the efforts to standardize instant messaging protocols. Tribal Voice, along with Microsoft, Infoseek, Activerse and PeopleLink, announced this week ongoing support for the Internet Engineering Task Force's Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol. Microsoft and more than 40 other companies proposed standardizing instant messaging technology two years ago, but a protocol has yet to be ratified.
