Adding online presence as a
key piece of the software infrastructure stack has long been
promised but never delivered. However, Vayusphere is one
company that is finding a use for presence; its Instant
Response Server enables applications to send messages to
people in real time and receive an actionable response in
return.
Impact
assessment
| The
message |
Vayusphere has become
one of the first companies to leverage online presence
and availability information to solve a real business
problem: that of engineers and other remote workers
needing to respond to messages generated by
applications. The company's Instant Response Server uses
its own corporate instant messaging tools as the basis
of what could become a new part of the software
infrastructure stack.
|
| Competitive
landscape |
There's not much
direct competition, but help desk companies, such as
Siebel, PeopleSoft, Pivotal and SupportSoft, and systems
management firms, such as Computer Associates, IBM
Tivoli and Hewlett-Packard, are in the space.
ActiveBuddy is trying to extend its consumer-focused IM
agent technology to enterprise applications. In
corporate IM, Vayusphere faces AOL, Bantu, Communicator,
Ikimbo, Jabber, Linqware, Lotus, Microsoft, Omnipod and
Yahoo.
|
| The451
assessment |
Corporate IM will have
to do more than simply enable the sending and receiving
of messages if it is to become a key piece of enterprise
software, and Vayusphere's approach goes some way toward
achieving that. Its application-to-application messaging
clearly sets it apart from the other corporate IM
products, and while it will inevitably face competition
from major systems management players, it has a window
of opportunity to either establish itself or make itself
into an attractive acquisition
target.
|
Context Vayusphere was formed in July
2000 by CEO Pushpendra Mohta while he was
entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital. Mohta founded
an early ISP, CERFnet, back in 1989. CERFnet was acquired by
Teleport Communications in 1996, which in turn was bought by
AT&T in early 1998. Mohta ended up running the IP backbone
for AT&T and launched it into the Web hosting business. He
left AT&T for Benchmark, which was an investor in
Vayusphere in its last round, back in 2000. Other existing
investors include Marc Andreessen, former FCC chairman Reed
Hundt and Kontiki CEO Mike Homer, among others. The company is
about to begin a new round of fundraising that it expects to
close in the first quarter of 2003. It is looking for between
$5-8m.
Vayusphere is focusing on markets where the cost
of delayed responses is high, such as help desks, field
service engineers and equity trading. Its software enables
applications to track down individuals based on their presence
and availability information, and give them a choice of
actions based on an event. Many support systems can issue
tickets to specific users via pagers or mobile phones, but
Vayusphere enables a user to choose an option and relay the
information back to the application to make it actionable.
Vayusphere calls this "closed loop response."
Online
presence is the most valuable derivative of the instant
messaging explosion that began in 1996. More than 200 million
consumers now use IM to communicate regularly, with presence
technology identifying who is online. Over the past two or
three years, early-stage companies and some established
players have been promising to use presence information as the
basis of a new applications platform. Very few have done so,
and Vayusphere is among the select few.
Products Instant Response Server (it
uses the acronym IRiS, instead of IRS, for obvious reasons)
comprises four elements: a presence, availability and location
server; a response agent server; an instant messaging server;
and application integration components, including native
adapters and hooks into existing EAI products.
The
process starts with an event in an application – supported
applications currently include BMC Remedy's Action Request
System, Siebel's Field Service, Computer Associates Service
Desk, and there are agents for LDAP, SQL and Unix remote shell
access. The event triggers a message to be sent to the IRiS
server, which checks the person's profile to assess their
availability and what device they happen to be using at the
time, and then relays the message. If the message is not for a
specific person, the server can search for people with the
necessary skill level to deal with the message. Although the
user's client is currently most likely to be a desktop IM
tool, it could also be a presence-enabled calendar or a
GPS-enabled handheld device.
During implementation
Vayusphere and the customer decide upon 10 or so actions that
are undertaken regularly, such as open, accept, reassign or
close tickets, open a note, get a list and so on, and map
those to key strokes or numbers that can be inputted simply,
regardless of the device.
Most of the early
implementations have used Vayusphere's IM tool – for which it
makes a 100-user license available for free. But IRiS can also
support IBM Lotus SameTime, Microsoft's Real Time
Communications Server and Exchange Server IM tools, as well as
the consumer IM networks of AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo.
Vayusphere's IM gateway connects to alls sorts of devices, and
can also send emails, instead of instant messages, if that's
what the user requires. The IRiS product is now on version
3.0.
Typical deployments start at $50,000, based on the
number of users and applications connected using IRiS. The
corporate IM product starts at $40 per user with volume
discounts, and the response Agents that link to the
applications cost between $25,000-50,000.
Customers It's still early on for
Vayusphere, but so far the company has secured about five
paying customers since the product started shipping roughly
six months ago. It has about 10 pilots going on, plus a
further 200 or so evaluations, although that number includes
the free IM server.
Strategy
Despite the fact that the early opportunity lies with field
service and help desk applications, Vayusphere ultimately sees
itself providing a platform offering presence and availability
management plus an application server to link applications to
IM servers. And although Vayusphere has included pre-packaged
agents, it also includes a software developer's kit, and it
anticipates a significant OEM opportunity. On top of all that,
it has a corporate IM product that is as feature-rich as most
of the competition.
Vayusphere already has a couple of
system integrator partnerships with Fujitsu Consulting and HCL
Perot Systems, and some technology partners, including IBM,
Computer Associates and TimesTen.
Competition There's not much direct
competition in terms of firms offering presence-enabled
response servers, but there is a huge amount of competition
from the help desk companies, such as Siebel, PeopleSoft,
Pivotal and SupportSoft, and systems management firms, such as
Computer Associates, IBM Tivoli and Hewlett-Packard.
ActiveBuddy is trying something similar by extending
its consumer-focused IM agent technology to enterprise
applications, but this responds to a human inquiry, rather
than one from an application. We expect IBM to do something
similar, combining SameTime and Tivoli.
There are some
presence servers from firms including Evolving Systems, Indigo
Software and Nokia, but they are generally aimed at the
communications market. We doubt there is a sustainable market
for stand-alone enterprise presence servers. Instead, they
will become part of the infrastructure stack over time.
Even though corporate IM is not Vayusphere's ultimate
ambition, it faces competition in that sector from AOL, Bantu,
Communicator, Ikimbo, Jabber, Linqware, Lotus, Microsoft,
Omnipod and Yahoo to one extent or another.
SWOT analysis
| Strengths |
Weaknesses |
| Vayusphere has
identified a problem and come up with an answer that
sits well with the current requirement that any
enterprise software product should have a clear
short-term ROI. |
It's a small company
with few resources or partners at present, although that
could be set to change. |
| Opportunities |
Threats |
| Opportunity depends on
numerous outside factors, including the level of
education in the market about presence and availability.
Acquisition would be a likely exit strategy, perhaps by
one of its partners. |
Vayusphere will need
to watch likely moves from IBM and others to leverage
technology that they already possess to compete directly
with Vayusphere. |
