Yahoo And WebEx Make Collaboration InstantYahoo And WebEx Make Collaboration Instant

Growing numbers of companies want to use instant messaging to jump-start collaborative processes, and Yahoo Inc. is about to give them more ways to do just that. With the next release of its corporate IM product, due later this year, Yahoo will team with WebEx Communications Inc. to let users launch Web-conferencing sessions from within their IM clients, and BEA Systems Inc. will begin shipping its line of WebLogic products with software development kits containing APIs that will let developers embed integration with Yahoo's IM in the applications they build.

The deal with WebEx appears to be a counter to Microsoft's acquisition earlier this year of WebEx competitor PlaceWare, which is expected to result in an integrated product that will combine PlaceWare's conferencing technology with the IM and presence capabilities of Microsoft's pending Real-Time Communications Server. "Our motive was the same as Microsoft's," says Ken Hickman, director of product strategy for Yahoo enterprise solutions. "It was customers." With the deal, Yahoo gets a leg up on selling corporate IM to WebEx's 7,500 customers.

Meanwhile, the BEA arrangement will let developers building apps on WebLogic configure them so users can push messages to users of Yahoo Enterprise Edition, says Scott Dietzen, BEA's chief technology officer. For instance, someone processing a transaction would be able to see immediately if someone needed to approve the transaction was online, and then send a request to that person. The integration also will let Yahoo corporate IM users reach into enterprise apps such as customer-relationship management software, enterprise resource planning software, and sales-force automation tools, expanding on existing relationships it has with BEA, Novell, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems that enable integration of IM with app servers and corporate directories.

Ironically, the BEA integration also targets Microsoft. Both Microsoft and IBM Lotus Software have real-time collaboration capabilities that can be paired with their .Net and WebSphere app servers, respectively, so Yahoo was a logical partner for BEA to even the playing field. He says the company also plans to explore a similar integration with AOL's corporate instant messaging offering.

Dietzen says integration with Yahoo IM will prove attractive to customers who have built real-time processes into apps but may want a simpler approach to adding text messaging. "A lot of customers don't want to build a Java application to do lightweight real-time collaboration," he says.

The promise of the WebEx integration is good news for Jasper Design, an Internet applications builder that uses the consumer version of Yahoo Messenger and is also a WebEx customer. The company has been fighting employee inertia when it comes to setting up WebEx sessions, but Ike DeLorenzo, director of technology, says being able to launch a meeting from within Yahoo IM will almost certainly result in increased use of the WebEx service. DeLorenzo says Jasper employees frequently pass on collaborative opportunities because IM doesn't have enough features and they're reluctant to learn how to set up a WebEx meeting. "I'm excited that now we'll be able to move on from chatting and sharing URLs to doing things like document and application sharing," he says.

DeLorenzo says the WebEx integration has him thinking seriously about purchasing licenses of Yahoo's corporate IM offering and expanding Jasper's WebEx license. "This is a strong reason to argue for buying new technology," he says.

The WebEx and BEA integrations will be compatible with the next release of Yahoo Messenger Enterprise Edition, due by the end of the year. It's a subscription service; pricing starts at $30 per user per year, including all upgrades.