It’s probably been coined already, and I’m sure it’s not a new realisation. Something happened at my employer recently that’s made me wonder whether the old benchmark of “enterprise-grade” is really relevant any more.
Our internal IM system was closed down for a while this week, and when it was restarted a number of us could not reconnect. It turns out that the IM servers had been set up to lock this particular client out. Nothing unusual about that really, as it has happened in the past with unsupported clients that stress the servers in unexpected ways.
What was different this time is that the client in question is part of a new “integrated communications” offering — a version of our e-mail client that has the IM client built-in. This product, which will be sent to-market quite soon (and therefore we will be expecting our customers to buy), has been locked out of our IM infrastructure. The further irony is that the part of the business that markets this software runs a “use what we make” initiative to get people to use development versions of their software in their day-to-day work.
The IM system in question is marketed as enterprise-grade — and in general it lives up to that, having to support a couple of hundred-thousand users at peak. What got me thinking though is that systems like MSN Messenger (or whatever it’s called now) and Yahoo! IM and AOL IM must be supporting millions of connections at a time with nary a blink.
So (if it wasn’t already) I’m knocking “enterprise-grade” off the top-spot of reliability rankings. Nowadays, the top spot surely goes to “Internet-grade”. I mean, just imagine the amount of traffic that must pour through Google Talk and Skype — these are systems that not only do text chat but voice and video as well — while our IM is still struggling with smilies and changing fonts. The trouble, in the case of my employer, is that the name of this IM service is synonymous with the concept of IM there. It doesn’t matter that even an open system like Jabber could scale better.
In my opinion, our software people need to take a look at what Google has done in taking XMPP/Jabber and creating Google Talk. Either that or the company needs to do what another prominent software company did and actually use one of the public IM systems (I cant remember which one they use, either YIM or AIM) as the corporate IM platform.
I feel for the developers of the new client, who I’m sure would love to have a stable environment to do a large-scale test on. Oh well.
Crossed Wires 