I recently has a long conversation with Oracle's Steve Levine and Sunir Kapoor, who serve as VP of Marketing and VP of Engineering respectively in the Enterprise Messaging and Collaboration business unit -- two of the folks behind Oracle's Collaboration Suite. I was pushing to find out why they had decided to go to market without including instant messaging in the suite. The answer was not at all what I had expected.

First of all, Oracle's plan has been to push aggressively in the email side of the market. This makes sense on a market level since Microsoft and IBM are both in the midst of a major reshuffling of messaging technology. The release of the-technology-formerly-known-as-RTC (now Microsoft Office Live Communication Server) is scheduled for Q3, and this serves as a forcing function for an Exchange upgrade. Likewise, IBM's gyrations around Notes (basically declaring it a legacy technology that has only a few years of life left) and the murky transition path to Lotus Workplace create a decision point for those invested in IBM's messaging solutions too. Oracle feels that its time to push to capture share of market, and that IBM and Microsoft are looking so hard at each other that Oracle will be able to swoop in and rapidly become a strong number three player, maybe even number two (look out, IBM).

But why wait on instant messaging?

It looks like Oracle is planning on catching the two majors in the enterprise instant messaging space by deploying a deeply integrated instant messaging capability as part of release 3 of Collaboration Suite (first half of 2004), instead of launching a loosely integrated instant messaging application. By deeply integrated I mean that presence and real-time communication will be implemented as core services way down deep in the Oracle communication stack, so that all the other elements of the Suite can exploit them.

Note that this 'lowering' of presence management and real-time communication is just what IBM has gone through with the reformulation of the Sametime application into presence, instant messaging, and web conferencing services, and likewise forms the basis of Microsoft's real-time collaboration strategy. So Oracle plans to leapfrog directly to an architecture where instant messaging -- or more specifically, presence information -- will be a cornerstone of collaborative solutions. In particular, Oracle intends to integrate presence into the rules engine within the Suite's workflow services. This means that routing of time sensitive information can be controlled in real-time based on the presence and availability of those in the position to use it right now, as opposed to using static roles or identities.

Microsoft and IBM are making this transition, too, and I have spoken with folks in both those organizations that get this vision. However, the effort involved in transitioning from the first generation instant messaging application architecture to a second generation presence and real-time communication services architecture is significant, not only for the vendors, but for the companies using the technologies.

Oracle plans to avoid that hassle, for itself and its customers, and to jump one square ahead, smack into the second generation on the first time out. They see that when presence and availability are incorporated into the core information routing of collaborative services, we will have a true real-time revolution in enterprise information technology. Oracle is unique in the market because their first release of instant messaging technology will be based on the insight that the real payoff of IM is not on-the-fly chat, but deep and tight integration with core enterprise information flow.