I had the opportunity to meet with Shane Pearson from BEA last week at the Instant Messaging Planet conference, to learn more about the company's plans for real-time collaboration and how it might fit in with BEA's product plans. My initial interest had been sparked by a FaceTime press release from August. Because of difficulties in scheduling a time to talk (including my recent brain surgery) we were unable to coordinate a call until the conference.

I thought at first that BEA was structuring a very tightly coupled approach to integrating FaceTime's IM platform, but according to Pearson, BEA intends to remain open to relationships with many IM integration platforms, and to support a looser integraiton strategy.

Several of the large players in the instant messaging marketplace, including IBM, Microsoft, and (soon) Oracle, are also competing in BEA's main market, application servers and related softwarea nd services. Last year, I wrote a report for Cutter called Time to Get Real: Moving Toward the Real-time Enterprise, in which I introduced the idea of the "War of the Stacks," where these players will be fighting over the future of enterprise software architecture and that future will be -- in part -- defined around real-time communication capabilities.

Unlike the one-off, hand-built systems that may be in use today at large enterprises, where instant messgaing has been retrofitted into enterprise line-of-business (LOB) applications that were not initially designed with real-time communication in mind, we can now start to visualize a new generation of LOB applications that build upon real-time communication functionality provided by the enterprise application platform, such as IBM WebSphere. However, this will require that instant messaging applications be refactored into services within enterprise application stacks. This is exactly what IBM, Microsoft, and (soon) Oracle are doing. And that's what I thought BEA was doing with FaceTime, but I was a little ahead of the game.

BEA has identified how instant messaging might be profitably integrated into its application framework, and is inviting vendors of IM integration platforms like FaceTime, IMlogic and others to integrate with BEA's products. While this is a inclusive strategy, and opens the door for existing and presumptive users of BEA's technology to take advantage of instant messaging for BEA-supported applications, it may not go far enough to counter the value of tightly integrated solutions like those that will be offered by Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle.

On the other hand, short of developing or acquiring its own IM solution, playing the field may be the best near-term course for BEA, and the actions that it is taking demonstrate once again that real-time communication is rapidly becoming intrinsic to future enterprise line-of-business applications, not a superficial afterthought.