But the messaging market is relatively mature. Customers have understood the strategic importance of messaging for some time and have deployed lots of products. We also have a small number of well-entrenched vendors with large market shares. Standards have much larger mountains to move as they attempt to take over corporate messaging systems. For example, the degree to which customers can base messaging systems on pure standards implementations remains a question of priorities.
Replication remains a shortcoming, and there's no standard calendaring and scheduling protocol.
This features gap between standards-based and proprietary products will be a factor in buying decisions for some time. Customers can implement pure standard protocols while waiting for them to catch up in functionality or implement proprietary protocols to get functions they need. That trade-off is also causing vendors to make some interesting choices as they build products. Established vendors such as Lotus, Microsoft and Novell are creating multiprotocol servers that support both proprietary protocols and Internet standards, for example, but they're competing based on the features their proprietary protocols provide. For customers with large installed bases of proprietary messaging systems, such a multiprotocol approach may be the best migration path toward Internet standards.