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Now you can e-mail the invisible man too
Targeted at making e-mail available to deskless workers of
an organisation, IBM’s Lotus Workplace Messaging platform boasts of being a
cheaper tool to communicate with employees. CHRIS ANN FICHARDO reports
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| As the market has matured, the need today is to differentiate
between the classes of users and provide a price point and product point
at each level, says Tapan Mehta |
While the ubiquitous e-mail is a facility
that is taken for granted by most office users, there are still about 300 million
workers worldwide who have to yet to discover the convenience of using e-mail
to communicate with their colleagues and management.
These workers mainly consist of factory
floor workers, shop assistants, airline employees and other workers that do
not have a dedicated workspace or current e-mail access. And it is this workforce
that constitutes the target audience of Lotus Workplace Messaging, an IBM Web-based
messaging solution that aims to cost-effectively extend enterprise messaging
to workers without a dedicated workspace or current e-mail access.
"Workplace messaging is the first
part of the workplace platform. So if you take messaging as a market space,
there were integrated collaborative applications that could do more than just
message. As the market has matured, the need today is to differentiate between
the classes of users and provide a price point and product point at each level,"
says Tapan Mehta, IBM
India’s country manager for Lotus Software.
IBM is hoping to take Workplace messaging
to large number of deskless workers in government offices, PSU firms and smaller
corporate houses. Mehta reckons that if the worldwide potential is around a
$1 billion in revenue terms, then the potential in India would be much larger
as there are workers even at the second rung that do not have e-mail access.
"So the Indian challenge is much more exciting and very different,"
comments Mehta.
According to the company, Lotus Workplace
Messaging will provide employees using shared workstations an electronic communication
medium that can send and receive company information, such as HR resources updates,
schedules, security bulletins and pay stubs, which was normally exchanged via
paper-based communication. "These costs are hidden but real; replace this
with an electronic mailing system and there is a definite reduction in cost,"
emphasises Mehta. "Today the entire communication is in a disconnected
mode. It follows a top-down approach—the ability to collaborate across employee-to-employee
and customers is too long—and that is something this application addresses.
So there are cost savings as well increasing on productivity and efficiency
of an organisation," he adds.
Realising that the new product will be
used by those who are not too IT-savvy, IBM has developed a product that requires
very little training. Built on open standards, Lotus Workplace messaging can
be integrated with a customer’s existing messaging infrastructure. Designed
to fit alongside standards-based directory and integrated messaging environments,
this application runs on the IBM WebSphere Internet infrastructure software
and uses IBM’s DB2 universal database to deliver scalability and overall performance.
Mehta says that Lotus workplace messaging
is the first product in the Workplace platform, which is targeted as an alternative
to what IBM currently offers. With support of standards such as LDAP v3, it
can integrate with Lotus Domino and other standards-based messaging infrastructures
as well.
In fact in the current year, IBM also plans
to get more aggressive on the Lotus applications front. Mehta says that last
year saw a record number of customer win-backs, mainly because IBM now offers
the opportunity to grow beyond messaging and into collaboration and workflow.
As a large number of customers were earlier concentrating on core applications
like ERP, it’s only now that the market for applications based on the Lotus
platform is emerging. "Lotus provides applications on top of core applications,
it takes care of administrative processes, workflow and e-learning solutions.
The Lotus platform has a large number of applications ready in the market. Our
strength in the Indian market is the large number of partners who have
developed applications and deployed it across organisations," says Mehta.
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US-based Ferris Research is a market research firm that specialises in
messaging and collaborative technologies such as e-mail, instant messaging,
group scheduling, desktop conferencing and directories. A white paper
published by the firm in 2001 entitled “Corporate e-mail outsourcing:
Justifying the cost” elaborates on three types of cost in any e-mail
system.
Direct costs:
- Messaging hardware, such as servers that store e-mail, directory,
and calendar information; and PCs that run gateway software, connecting
different types of e-mail systems.
- Messaging software licenses.
- Upgrades or migration costs. Outsourcing is often considered at the
time staff need to change e-mail systems (for example, moving from cc:Mail
to Exchange or Notes/Domino), or undergoing a major upgrade (as with
Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2000).
- Technical support staff.
Indirect costs:
These are also tangible and are budgeted for, but typically they are
paid from non-messaging budgets. The main costs relate to the computing
platform upon which e-mail runs: workstation PCs, the network that connects
everything, WAN links, shared printers, shared fileservers and their operating
systems, and so on. The cost of the support staff that run the basic computing
infrastructure must also be considered.
E-mail user productivity costs:
- Personal e-mail.
- Peer support time. Many users spend a certain amount of time helping
colleagues with questions about how to use e-mail.
- Informal learning. Users spend time teaching themselves and experimenting
with system features.
- Downtime due to system outages.
- Downtime caused by e-mail-borne viruses.
- Spam.
Source: Ferris Research
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