Unified Communications
To many, "unified communications" means
voicemail integration with Exchange. Such
integration isn't a new concept—vendors such
as Nortel have supported voicemail integration
for Exchange since the late 1990s, albeit only
for specific PBXs and with some expensive
hardware. The idea behind UC—being able
to access information from many different
sources in an integrated manner and appropriately
to the device used—is compelling.
Certainly, anyone who has used Exchange
Server 2007 Unified Messaging (UM) would
be unlikely to want to return to a traditional
voicemail system.
What's changing today is the entry of Microsoft
into the market with Exchange UM and a
new version of Office Communications Server
(OCS) in combination with Cisco's determination
to leverage its predominance in networks
and move into the applications area. Cisco
Unity, which connects Exchange to voicemail
via Cisco Call Manager, directly competes
with Exchange UM. Microsoft is tackling the
problem of how to integrate voice, data, and
video by incorporating these capabilities into
its applications. On the one hand, Microsoft
is exploiting its huge installed base by driving
down the price of applications like UM to
encourage customers to move to those applications.
On the other hand, Cisco is evolving
its huge base of networking and products to
add applications like Unity and powering the
transition from older analog-based PBXs to
VoIP to introduce customers to the possibilities
of UC. Both companies say they're working
together, but the reality is that we're likely
to see full-blown competition to win market
share. Of course, Microsoft and Cisco connect
to different people within the overall customer
base: Microsoft usually connects with teams
responsible for deploying applications such as
Exchange, whereas Cisco usually connects with
the teams that provide network infrastructure
and telephony services. In many cases, these
teams aren't well integrated, which causes
some tension internally. But competition usually
drives innovation. With two heavyweights competing
for leadership in UC, we can expect
features and functionality in applications to
improve, better integration with existing infrastructures,
new devices (for example, new
generations of VoIP phones), and lower costs.
Information Management
If you've been running Exchange for any length
of time, it's likely that you have too much
email in your databases. You undoubtedly have
some important information locked up in the
databases that isn't immediately accessible,
and you might find
that you need that
information to comply
with legislative or
regulatory requirements.
Microsoft
designed Exchange
to be an email server,
not an information
archiving and recovery
system, and
given the increasing
demands on corporations
to comply
with regulations
from the Health
Insurance Portability
and Accountability
Act (HIPPA) to the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX)
Act to SEC 17-4a, there's a lot of activity within
the Exchange ecosystem to provide information
management solutions.
Work to figure out how best to manage the
information held in Exchange databases began
ten years ago. Symantec's Enterprise Vault
product originally began as a project within
Digital Equipment in 1997 to offload messages
from Exchange and move them into a Hierarchical
Storage Management (HSM)-like vault.
At that time, storage was expensive and servers
were hard-pressed to manage very large
databases (and Exchange was restricted to a
16GB database). Over time, storage costs have
come down, Exchange now supports huge
databases running on 64-bit servers, Microsoft
Volume Shadow Copy Service permits online
snapshots to back up databases, and the challenge
now focuses on mining information from
Exchange for corporate purposes such as compliance.
A wide variety of products help users
and companies control information better. For
example, ClearContext offers software to help
Outlook users organize messages intelligently. HP, Commvault, Mimosa Systems, and CA
all offer products that mine information from
Exchange databases.
Microsoft introduced context-based indexing
for databases in Exchange 2007. (Earlier
attempts to provide similar functionality
weren't successful because indexing stole too
many system resources.) Outlook 2007 clients
that work in cached Exchange mode use
Windows Desktop Search (WDS) to initiate
connections to PST files from their mailbox,
as Figure 2 shows. Although current search
technology can index the metadata from voice
and graphic messages, it can't index the actual
content. I expect this situation to change as
R&D investments in new search technology
result in the ability to index nontext content.
We can expect the overall volume of email to
increase. To create a complete picture of corporate
data, repositories other than mailboxes—such as SharePoint portals, team spaces, and
public folders—will need to be searchable. I
expect Microsoft to improve the search and
retrieval capability in Exchange and to forge a
closer connection with SharePoint (if only to
bridge the gap that occurs around public folder
migration), but I don't expect the company to
enter the instant messaging (IM) arena.
Software as a Service
Microsoft's biggest challenge, both technically
and economically, is to change the way users
license and consume software from a closed
system wherein users control the OS, server,
and clients, to a system wherein users select
applications that are delivered via the Internet.
Notable examples of successful application delivery, such as Salesforce.com, already
exist. Over the coming years, rapid growth in
network availability coupled with lower cost
and new Web-based programming models
will deliver some real alternatives to the classic
Windows+Exchange+Outlook solution for
enterprise-grade email.
Google is most likely to compete with Microsoft
in this space, and that company is already
making the necessary investments to build a
suite of programs that deliver Exchange-like
functionality. Gmail today is a long way from
being perfect, but it's already better than many
corporate email systems were a few years ago
and will benefit from Google's rapid-development
model to add features and become more
competitive against a full-function client like
Outlook. Google may have to develop its own
API to compete with the richness of MAPI
because Internet protocols such as IMAP4
aren't rich enough to support the range of
features that Outlook delivers.
Google is already pitching the prospect of
email delivered via the Internet as a service
to customers. Initial interest is from the education
sector, rather than large enterprises.
Universities are attracted by Google's single
annual fee to deliver email, calendar, and
IM. Breaking into the corporate sector won't
be easy for Google because IT teams will ask
questions about security, compliance, and
management that Google might find difficult
to answer today. But given time and development
effort, it's likely that Google and perhaps
other vendors will find answers that satisfy customers,
perhaps first in the small to medium
sector and then in large enterprises. Microsoft
might respond to the threat by developing its
Microsoft Live capabilities to achieve feature
and cost parity with Google. The difficulty will
be to develop a Microsoft email SaaS offering
without decimating the Exchange installed
base. In addition, Microsoft has to figure out
how Exchange and any future email product
will cooperate, interoperate, and coexist seamlessly
so that customers will be able to deploy
all or part of their organization on either or
both platforms and have the ability to move
data and mailboxes between them. This is a
staggeringly complex challenge, but it's possibly
the most important one for the long-term
future of Exchange.
Time Will Tell
After some twelve years of development,
there's still much for Microsoft to do to maintain
Exchange's status. The only thing that you
can be sure about technology is that it will
change over time; the trick is to understand
why technology changes and how the change
will influence and affect customer options.
The Exchange development group undoubtedly
has a few tricks up its sleeve to excite and
delight customers, but it would be surprising
if it doesn't already have the technologies I've
discussed here on its radar screen.
Tony Redmond