Wednesday, December 10, 2003

CMP Media

CMP Media: "Unified Communications (UC) promises to change this time-drain. By blending a company's wireless and wireline communications with unified messaging, presence intelligence, and user-provided routing instructions, companies can improve customer response time, reduce message overload, eliminate phone tag, and enhance remote collaboration. "

SAD: Although the title indicates unified communication, it is an interesting read on SIP and presence as well...

Akonix Nabs $11 Million

Akonix Nabs $11 Million: "Enterprise instant messaging gateway player Akonix Systems has $11 million in new financing to help it continue making a name for itself in the hotly competitive arena for business IM solutions. "
...
In connection with the broadening interest in enterprise IM solutions, the cash injection also comes following what Akonix said was a record third quarter, in which it added more than 50,000 licensed customer seats and doubled revenue from the previous quarter.

At the same time, the new financing also continues the hot interest in enterprise IM solutions from the venture capital arena. Early this year IMlogic closed $14 million in new financing. In late 2002, FaceTime landed an undisclosed amount of new funds in November from Bank of America, bringing its total backing to more than $40 million.

SAD: The interesting parallel to follow for similar industry growth would be that of the early email infrastructure add-on vendors, those that provided SMTP gateways, security services, management tools, etc. Most of the add-on market products will eventually have to be features of the core IM platform so it will be interesting to see these companies adapt accordingly.

Monday, December 08, 2003

AOL Preps Live Video IM

AOL Preps Live Video IM: "America Online is poised to unveil the next version of its client software, and which includes an enhancement to its built-in instant messaging that offers streaming videoconferencing.
The Dulles, Va.-based Internet giant, a unit of New York media conglomerate Time Warner (Quote, Chart), plans to launch the next version of its flagship client software, codenamed Tahiti, early into 2004. With that release, the AOL software should include capabilities enabling AOL subscribers to initiate streaming video sessions from within an IM conversation. "