Smarter ways of working

It started with email, then instant messaging, chat, VoIP, knowledge management. What next?

It's 8 pm Aaron, an Illinois police officer walks into his office. He's on the team that is investigating a homicide. He activates the calendar on his desktop, scheduling a neighbourhood canvass for 7 am the next day.

Ellen, his colleague, begins entering leads in shared files. Bob activates the discussion tool and posts intelligence on violent felons who have been released from nearby prisons.

The next morning, new members join the task force and quickly read up on what's occurred overnight. Jim, a supervisor, quickly sees which suspects have been interviewed and who is next on the list. The investigation is in full swing, and though task force members come and go during the investigation, everyone involved is on the same page.

The very software that Jim and his team uses, allows any team the world over to work over a network as if its members were in the same physical location. Known as Groove virtual office (now acquired by Microsoft), it is a peer-to-peer (P2P) collaboration software founded by Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie (now CTO, Microsoft).

Used even by Interpol today, it has helped the US army in Afghanistan and Iraq to communicate over a secure and reliable virtual network. Even the Florida authorities have used Groove to coordinate the relief work for the Katrina victims.

Besides, it's being used the world over by companies like Siemens, HP, DHL, Pfizer and Wipro to cater to their collaboration needs.

"Groove, with around four million users, has threaded discussions, calendars, project management, white board, chat, VoIP and instant messaging "� all in one product. It can be deployed in any IT environment, behind firewalls with no change in security settings, no open ports, and will work with double NAT (Network Address Translation) and even GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) connections with roaming IP addresses," asserts Ashok Hingorani, CEO Computact.

The only Groove development partner in India, Hingorani has even urged the Mumbai police to use the software.

No More Information Silos
Groove, of course, is not the only player who is shaping the way we work.

Information workers currently use many devices "� landline phones, cellular phones, smartphones, PDAs, desktops, laptops and Internet kiosks "� to communicate and access information in different ways.

These disconnected devices tend to create islands (silos) of data, and there's often no way to move easily back and forth between these communication modalities. Defined as 'point products', they offer solutions to a single problem. Collaboration suites, on the other hand, can address many issues.

Welcome to the age of collaboration suites "� email, chat, VoIP, instant messaging (IM), document and knowledge management, blogging, wikis and much more put together.

When an employee says "come speak at a Web conference" rather than "send me an email", it means much faster information exchange. Email has a problem of spam and security and real time; IMs too have security issues.

IT majors such as IBM, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Novell, SAP and BEA have big stakes in the collaboration space. Centra Software, CollabraSpace, Jive Software, Ramius, SiteScape and WebEx Communications are the other known players in this space.

Ashwani Chandhok, Business Development Manager, Oracle, notes that organizations generally graduate from simple email services to web conferencing, VOIP chat, instant messaging, and discussion forums. Collaboration efforts finally blossom into a knowledge management portal.

"There's a clear trend of businesses swapping point products for collaboration suites," says Director, ICT Practice, Alok Shende, Frost and Sullivan.

Pankaj Ukey, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft India, corroborates: "Integrated communication breaks down the silos of communication (e-mail, meetings, phone calls, IM) and brings them together into an integrated and intuitive experience."

The Indian market size for advanced collaboration tools should touch $18.3 million by 2008, predicts Shende. It currently stands at $ 6.5 million.

"Advanced collaborative platforms having been growing consistenly, with a CAGR of 44.4 per cent," he adds. The key adopters of collaborative suites have been the manufacturing and IT / ITES sectors (30 per cent each), followed by the BFSI segment (20 per cent) and the government (15 per cent).

Gartner estimates the worldwide Web conferencing and team-based collaboration market to reach $1.1 billion by 2008.

This market "� currently standing at a little over $ 680 million "� while still in an early phase of adoption, is converging and transitioning, according to Gartner, whose analysts opine that overall adoption will continue to increase as these technologies become more integrated with business processes.

By 2010, the total conferencing services market alone is expected to be valued at $700 million, with a CAGR of 11.78 percent.

Maturing Trends
Sun Microsystems employees, for instance, can log into their networks from any place and part of the world.

"At our office in Singapore, my colleagues can work on any floor. They just locate a system (workspace) and log on to the network, and all the services (which they're authorised to use) get delivered to them. The network is transparent and always available," says Matt Thompson, Director, Technology Outreach & Open Source Programs Office, Sun Microsystems. Sun offers the same Java-enabled functionality to its clients.

Microsoft always had collaboration products that work with its popular Office applications, including Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. For instance, the Tata Indicom web conferencing service is based on the Microsoft Office Live Meeting Platform.

Microsoft is expected to incorporate key features of Groove in the next version of Office and Windows Vista. As for IBM, after its Lotus Notes/Domino integrated collaboration platform (with around 80 million users), it has introduced its Workplace as its next strategic direction for collaborative applications.

"I think our business results demonstrate that enterprises are adopting collaborative technologies. IBM Workplace has had three consecutive quarters of double digit revenue growth," says R Dhamodaran, Country Manager, Software Group, IBM India.

BEA bundles collaborative functionality in its WebLogic Portal product. This provides a single window for the employee to complete their functional, human resources and collaborative activities.

"This minimizes the learning curve as well takes care of security. i.e. a sales director could use WebLogic Portal to track revenue numbers (functional) his expenses and leave status (HR) and start a discussion forum on launching a new product (collaborative)," says Dhruv Singhal, Head Professional Services, BEA Systems. BEA also uses Groove for collaboration.

The Oracle Collaboration Suite 10g leverages a relational database to offer a secure, reliable and scalable way to simplify business communications and consolidate information "� reducing hardware, software and administration costs.

As for Linux initiatives, there's the Hula project which is trying to bring together blogging tools that allow people to publish journal entries that can be easily shared with others, wikis that allow people to edit Web pages from within a browser, and XML (eXtensible Markup Language) namespaces for bringing order to those documents. Hula is promoted by Novell.

Return on Investment
The real value of collaborative suites is realised when they offer their services in context of a business processes.

Suites such as Groove allow third-party developers to develop custom tools to integrate their existing company information and processes with the Groove platform. Besides, in developing countries like India, price (return on investment or ROI) is a factor too.

A lifetime Groove license costs just $ 170 (you can try it free for 60 days). "There's a very strong business value case to be made for investing in these real-time technologies. Microsoft alone expects to save $ 70 million in 2005 by using MOLM (Microsoft Office Live Meeting) to replace one-in-five business trips."

The technology is there. Interoperability issues need to get ironed out. Besides, as Thompson avers:"There nothing more important to collaboration than trust."

Cultural differences also play a strong role in adoption of collaboration technologies. In Asia/Pacific and Japan, face-to-face meetings are preferred and, at times, business travel for meetings is seen as a privilege, notes Gartner.

And it's important to remember as Shende puts it: "Collaboration is not a quick fix. As part of a re-engineering effort, it may take two to fours years to see the result."