Whatever happened to LCS 2005?

January 26, 2007

By Paul Rubens

It's hard to ignore a 400 pound gorilla. And when we're talking about the software market, the gorilla in question is invariably Microsoft. In the enterprise instant messaging segment of the market, the gorilla comes in the form of Microsoft's Live Communications Server (LCS) 2005.

But here's the thing: while the gorilla is not being ignored exactly, it's not getting the kind of attention that a large and very hairy primate might expect.

"There was an expectation in the market as a whole for LCS to do quite a bit better than it has," says Matt Anderson, a market analyst at research house Radicati Group. "Some people have signed up to it but installations have often taken longer than expected and overall the numbers are lower than you might have anticipated."

What's the reason for this lack of traction? Has Microsoft taken its eye off the ball while finalizing Vista and Server Longhorn, two vast projects which have occupied it for a number of years? Surely not: if any company has the resources to develop an OS or two without compromising development of its other products, it must be Microsoft.

It's true to say that no enterprise IM platform has emerged as the clear winner. Jabber has its supporters, as does IBM's SameTime, as indeed does LCS. It could be that LCS lacks some "killer" features that the other two platforms have, holding back potential sales. But what could they be?

Jabber differs from LCS in that it uses XMPP (define) , instead of the SIP (define) and SIMPLE (define) protocols used by LCS. This means that presence information can be extended beyond the instant messaging application itself much more easily, says Anderson. "LCS's extensibility is limited to Microsoft's own products, while with Jabber you have the potential to be much more creative – extending presence information to your CRM app for example," he says. On the other hand, this weakness is also a strength for LCS – companies that buy in to Microsoft's unified strategy will doubtless benefit from this tight integration across Microsoft applications, including telephony.

Voice and video conferencing is an important differentiator which separates LCS from SameTime, believes Nick Shelness, senior analyst at Ferris Research. "LCS is lacking in that it has no conferencing built in," he says. SameTime is based on the H.323 protocol set, which has a multimedia control unit to handle voice and video bridging so it can do multi-party conferencing. But while SIP talks about how to initiate a multi-party call, no bridging is actually specified. "So with LCS, if you want to make a multi-party conference call, you have to use a conferencing vendor. LCS has the APIs, but doesn't have conferencing built in. So you are buying point to point, but multipoint is not included, and for a corporation doing a feature analysis, that is a big deal," says Shelness. It's not likely that this situation is going to change any time soon. That's because the main thrust for LCS 2007 is integration and support for Office 2007 rather than the development and addition of new features.

Another area where the big three vendors differ is in their connectivity with other networks. It's unthinkable that any organization would implement a proprietary e-mail system that only worked internally and didn't allow communication with suppliers, customers, or the world at large, but this is still partially the case with enterprise IM systems. LCS customers using LCS Federated Services can communicate with Yahoo!, MSN and AIM users, but currently SameTime can't talk to MSN. Jabber, on the other hand, can communicate with public networks using transports which work differently to inter-domain federation. But this doesn't give LCS the competitive advantage you might think.

Why? Because at the moment, rightly or wrongly, the market doesn't seem to see interconnectivity as an important differentiator. "The potential customer base just doesn't seem to see it as as much of a big deal as they should," says Radicati's Anderson. So although Microsoft holds all the aces, customers aren't interested in this particular hand.

In fact it is very hard to tell how widely adopted LCS (or SameTime for that matter) really is. Vendor supplied figures need to be taken with a pinch of salt, as sales figures don't equate to platform usage: an enterprise license for Microsoft products might technically include LCS, but whether it is ever actually implemented is another matter. A more accurate figure would be the number of seats on maintenance, but few large companies are willing to reveal these details.

But at the end of the day, a gorilla is a very large beast that can't be ignored forever. Even if LCS 2005 implementations have been happening at a slower rate than expected, in the longer term that may not be so important: The next four of five years will tell if LCS can make a monkey out of IBM and Jabber, leaving it as the dominant silverback in the enterprise IM group; or if it'll be left behind to play for peanuts.

Source: http://www.instantmessagingplanet.com/enterprise/article.php/3656371