IBM Corp. announced plans to bring its considerable weight to the world of wireless instant messaging, a service that is quickly gaining additional users and big-name players.
The equipment giant made its entrance through its Lotus Development Corp. company last week, which released the Sametime Everyplace 1.0 product. The product is an extension of Lotus’ popular Mobile Notes and Domino Everyplace line of servers, and represents the company’s further push into the wireless industry.
“Now, for the first time, enterprises can have both desktop and mobile user awareness and instant messaging integrated together in a secure, reliable environment that leverages open Internet standards,” said Patricia Booth, director of unified communications for Lotus.
The Sametime Everyplace product, which uses SSL and Domino’s user authentication and encryption, allows business users to trade messages through a variety of devices, including mobile phones, personal digital assistants and messaging devices. In addition, users can determine if others are on- or off-line, a feature that has been much lauded as an important IM function.
The service runs on Domino servers and works over short message service and WAP standards. It also supports the popular BlackBerry e-mail device, as long as it has a WAP browser. Research In Motion Ltd., which makes BlackBerry devices, recently announced pointed support for Lotus’ Sametime Everyplace service. The two companies even joined to demonstrate the Sametime Everyplace service at Lotus’ developer’s conference last week in Las Vegas.
Sametime Everyplace offers a variety of features, including presence awareness, person-to-person and person-to-group chatting, messages between devices and desktop computers, and a user-defined mobile profile.
As instant messaging grows in popularity in the wired world, a variety of companies are seeking to mirror IM success in the wireless industry. Invertix Corp., Bantu Inc., Broadbeam Corp., Unimobile Inc. and a range of smaller companies are hoping to take the spotlight away from bigger names in the IM space, including America Online and Yahoo!. Other heavyweights aiming to get a piece of the instant messaging pie include L.M. Ericsson, Motorola Inc. and Nokia Corp., which recently founded an initiative to create IM and presence standards.
In addition, Microsoft Corp. announced plans to add instant- messaging functions to its .NET push, which represents the company’s attempt to offer an end-to-end wireless solution.
And while more and more companies are looking to make some money using instant-messaging services, they may have cause to increase their efforts. Analyst firm Gartner predicts instant messaging to account for up to 60 percent of all real-time communications by any means, including voice, text or call-and-response.
IBM’s jump into the IM space marks another standard and another major player, further mixing up the wireless instant messaging arena.
