Real-time apps

A sales engineer is at a customer site demonstrating a new release of a product. The customer's CTO asks a question the sales engineer can't answer, so he opens the presence-enabled corporate directory on his laptop and sees that the product manager and technical team leader are online and available.

The sales engineer highlights their names and with one click invites them into an instant-message session. In seconds, the question has been answered to the customer's satisfaction and the sales engineer has learned a new feature of the release.

Later, the account executive and customer are negotiating terms of the purchase. From a Web-based order entry form, the account executive sees an alert that the customer is behind on payment for the original license purchase. In a corner of the screen, green icons appear next to the name of the customer's accounts payable manager and the vendor's accounts receivable agent.

They all engage in a text chat that results in the customer's account being brought up to date via wire transfer, and the order being placed.

This type of collaboration, coming to a network near you in the not-too-distant future, will be based on technology that adds presence-awareness to common business applications.

Some early types of real-time collaboration are available today, but Ferris Research predicts that presence will become widely used in corporate environments over the next three to five years.

So how does it work? The good news is that getting from application, departmental and corporate silos to a fully integrated real-time corporation based on presence will require incremental changes rather than a major upheaval in enterprise systems.

Many of the underlying concepts have been around for a while. For example, IP networks connecting systems and transmitting messages by way of proprietary or standards-based protocols is basic. IT departments already use tools that continuously monitor and report states.

When presence-awareness is compiled into an application, an association is made between the creator of the file and the file itself. A few such "presence-embedded" applications are already available, with more expected by year-end.