OracleWorld is being held this week in San Francisco, and I had the chance to speak with Glen Vondrick, CEO of FaceTime, at the conference yesterday. FaceTime introduced an integration of its technology with Oracle's Application Server Portal at the conference. FaceTime is a leading player in the exploding market for enterprise instant messaging management solutions (archiving, security, and secure gateway technology for interconnecting public and private instant messaging networks) as well as real-time applications that leverage instant messaging (such as IM-based all center solutions).

Vondrick is very pragmatic, and has guided FaceTime through a very fast growth curve, based on listening to "what paying customers are willing to pay for," as Glen puts it. Clearly, real-time enabling the Oracle portal technology must be one of those critical needs. Oracle has yet to release instant messaging in its own Collaboration Suite (see Oracle's Angle: Second Generation First Time Out), but plans to do so in the first half of next year. Even so, FaceTime's solution will serve a critical purpose, which is serving up presence information in the portal about those using public networks (such as AIM, MSN, and Yahoo) or those using other enterprise instant messaging products -- FaceTime is partnered with IBM Lotus and Reuters, to name only two enterprise instant messaging providers.

Facetime has posted some impressive stats, such as gaining more than 50 of the top 100 global financial services firms as clients, to no small degree because of the company's history of listening to the customer. But the integration with portal technologies like Oracle opens up larger opportunities for the company, and a broader application for real time collaboration capabilities than simple instant messaging.

I have been writing for the past several years about the coming "war of the stacks" (see Get Real) where the major players in enterprise architecture integration will push instant messaging infrastructure deep, deep into the service stack. This means that IBM, Microsoft, BEA, and Oracle will be competing around these capabilities along with the ongoing battle around portals, application servers, middleware, and the like.

FaceTime, and its competitors, like IMlogic, Akonix, and IM-Age are likely to become critical pieces in the chess match between these enterprise architecture giants. I will be profiling all three companies in the next week or so, as well as digging into their strategies for future growth and success.