Since this thread has been all but dead for nearly 2 weeks, I'll try to liven things up. Remember thh grand Unified Messenger announcement in February? According to Octel, "General availability of the product is anticipated throughout the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Ireland within the next three months."
Let's see now. 3 months, that would be sometime in May correct. I have not heard any more news about UM except for the awards that the demo has been winning (never mind the absurdity of giving an award to a non-shipping product).
I have heard persistant rumors that Octel will slip the GA of UM until "around the end of the year". And nobody has countered these rumors with anything positive about UM's GA. Add this to IMA which was supposed to ship in "late 1996", and the Sierra fix that was nearly 2 years late, and maybe my point becomes clearer.
Octel is unable to deliver quality SW in a timely fashion. I know the SW industry well, and this is an excellent indication of a serious failure of technical leadership. Which further bolsters my opinion that this company is in trouble.
UM was winning awards because it is the only UM product that currently has a single message store, which makes administration easy. However, every major VM maker has announced UM. ACVC is shipping a dual-message-store solution. Perhaps Octel rushed out the announcement of a demonstratable product, but is having trouble getting it ready for prime-time. The real issues in VM are reliability and servicability, as well as ease of administration. I can't helpp but wonder what would limit Octel's UM to only 24 ports/box. Makes me wonder if they wrote UM in Visual Basic using one of the telephony app generators. A Pentium 166 can easily support 100 ports of VM if the code is clean and robust (and written in C++).
DavidR Ever the Octel bear :-) |
