The Bloor Perspective: Future messaging, the forgotten DB and Microsoft's open source AV spoiler

If you saw the film Back To The Future Part 2 you may remember the episode where Marty McFly was fired by a combination of fax, email video, mobile phone and more - a true multimedia sacking. This was a perceptive vision of the future because it is certainly not possible yet. Today we have desk phones, email, mobile phones and instant messaging in different and hard-to-manage communication domains.

The communication devices that we use are not versatile enough to pull these different domains together. To use the advanced functions of 3G phones you need to look at the screen and use a keyboard. This not the easy thing to do when you are holding it to your ear!

The desk phone has changed very little in function and intelligence beyond acquiring a small LCD strip. Few desk phones can handle even text messages and they hardly pull their weight as a partner to advanced mobile phones.

Earlier generation mobile phones became much more popular when they could connect to land lines. It is going to be equally important for manufacturers of 3G phones to be able to use videoconferencing and other advanced services between a mobile phone and a desk phone.

Integrating the communication domains will make life simpler but this requires more powerful terminals than today's desktop phone. Step forward the PC, closely followed by Microsoft. Microsoft executive Peyton Smith recently declared at an industry conference that office phones are destined to "collect dust". Microsoft's Real-Time Communications Server will be the vehicle for delivering this new capability starting with IM.

To support this vision, Microsoft has installed a key standard - Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) in Windows XP. Using the SIP protocol, PCs can signal each other in real time to handle instant messaging, indicate presence, notify events, set up phone calls and initiate videoconferencing. SIP could well become the HTML of real-time communications on the internet.

A key advantage of SIP over the Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) is that it allows you to know if someone is available before the call is made. You can then use the most appropriate communication tool instead of, for example, being unprepared to leave a voicemail message.

In a more complex application, you can receive a text message from a mobile phone, send more instant messages to colleagues and then establish a conference between people at their desks and people on mobile phones. All this can be done on the same PC screen using SIP and video conferencing software by pointing-and-clicking and dragging-and-dropping. First Virtual Communications are one web conferencing vendor that can provide this capability.

Quality is a key issue that will affect the uptake of these services - even these days it can be a struggle to get good voice quality over a 64Kbps line and video can suffer from lip-synch problems and delays. But speed and reliability is improving all the time.

In the future Marty McFly will be sacked via a wide range of multimedia but perhaps the only agent that will not play its part will be the POTS.

*The forgotten DB*

Ingres (officially Advantage Ingres Enterprise) is, arguably, the forgotten database. There used to be five major databases: Oracle, DB2, Sybase, Informix and Ingres. Then along came Microsoft and, if you listened to most press comment (or the lack of it), you would think that there were only two of the first list left, plus Microsoft's SQL Server.

The perception is that Informix, Ingres and Sybase are all dead in the water. Nothing could be further from the truth. For example, IBM is continuing (despite claims to the contrary by Oracle) to grow the Informix user base.

However, the big news that you won't have heard is that Ingres is by far the fastest growing database of these three and, although we don't have figures to corroborate this, it is not unlikely that the growth of the user base for Ingres is comparable to that of the 800lb gorillas.

This may seem a remarkable statement. If it's true, why hasn't it been picked up by IDC or other firms that do this sort of statistical analysis? The answer is simple: Computer Associates doesn't count product sales in the same way that other companies do.

Let me explain. If you license Unicenter from CA then that counts as a sale of Unicenter. It doesn't count as a sale of anything else. But Ingres has been embedded within Unicenter for seven years. Every sale of Unicenter has been a sale of Ingres but not one of the latter has been counted by CA as such a sale.

Now, put yourself in Larry Ellison's shoes (if you really want to): do you really think that sales of Oracle Financials do not get counted as sales of the Oracle database? Of course they do. From a marketing perspective it is entirely legitimate to count this as a sale of both products, as long as you don't do so from a revenue perspective.

Let's go back to CA. Ingres is not only embedded in Unicenter, it is also embedded in BrightStor, eTrust and EDBC (which is the company's middleware connectivity product). In fact, CA is in the process of embedding Ingres in every one of its products (of which there were over 1,200 the last time I counted) that requires a relational database.

Put the sales of all of those products together, plus the fact that CA is growing the Ingres user base directly (particularly through VARs and ISVs) and you get a product that is actually growing much faster than you thought. You may have forgotten about it but CA certainly hasn't: Ingres is much more widely used and deployed than most in the market would give it credit for.

Unfortunately for those that want to get a true picture of the market, CA does not limit itself to single counting Ingres. It does the same thing for CleverPath Portal and for Neugents, thus under emphasising the impact of both the portal product and CleverPath Predictive Analysis Server (which is used to develop the Neugents that are embedded to provide predictive analysis capability within applications). No doubt it does the same thing for other products too.

Maybe we should congratulate CA for not playing the game - when there are marketing sharks in the water it is certainly safer to keep your toes out of the pool - but it leads to the rest of us getting even more misled.

*Open source AV*

One of the more popular security products on Linux is RAV AntiVirus. It is deployed to protect mail servers that run any of the various open source email products such as SendMail, Qmail and Postfix and it comes, believe it or not, from a Romanian company called GeCAD.

Estimates suggest that RAV has about 10 million users world-wide, most of whom are Linux users. Although the product also runs on BSD Unix and Windows, the BSD market is small and it has only a minimal presence in the Windows market.

Nevertheless Microsoft has written a cheque and sealed a deal to buy GeCAD, announcing, as the ink was drying on the cheque, that it plans to discontinue the RAV product line. GeCAD and Microsoft will, of course, support the current customer base up to the end of their existing contracts.

The 'conspiracy wing' of the Linux community has suggested that Microsoft is embarking on a new tactic to stop the Linux tide - going out into the market with cheque book blazing and aiming its dirty dollars at key Linux companies in order to create difficult gaps in the rapidly growing Linux product line. This is unlikely to say the least.

Linux is a bit like the Hydra of Greek myth: you cut off its head and two open source heads grow in its place, at least one of which will be innovative, robust and widely adopted.

This is probably what will happen with RAV. It was, reportedly, the best and most used Linux product of its type and it will not be replaced quickly. However, replaced it will surely be.

For its part Microsoft has made no comment about its withdrawing RAV from the Linux market but it is clear that until Microsoft wakes up and smells the coffee, it is unlikely to push a single line of code in the direction of Linux.

Amy Carroll, the group manager at Microsoft's Security Business Unit, commented that it would be difficult for Microsoft to buy a company that didn't have products running on different platforms, adding that Microsoft was just interested in GeCAD's anti-virus engine and its programmers. This makes sense.

If I were an anti-virus company I'd be worried about what Microsoft's intentions are in the IT security area. A handful of vendors make big bucks from fixing the security weaknesses in Windows and Microsoft may plan to drink mightily from this revenue stream - with a little bit of help from Romania.

Bloor Research is a leading independent analyst organisation in Europe. You can find out more at www.bloor-research.com or by emailing mail@bloor-research.com.