* AOL reaches out to other IM providers
Instant messaging is a very useful tool for millions of enterprise users (and for millions of their teenage kids), but its utility tends to be limited to some extent by the proprietary nature of many of the networks. The fact that there is no equivalent to SMTP in the IM world prevents users of most of these tools from natively talking to one another as they can with competing e-mail systems. However, AOL recently announced that it has created the AOL Enterprise Federation Partner program to allow users to share presence information across disparate IM platforms and to communicate with each other.
The six companies whose IM systems are part of this federated network are Antepo, Jabber, Microsoft, Omnipod, Parlano and Reuters.
Under the AOL agreement, all of these companies’ systems will connect with the AOL Federation Gateway, which will translate and route instant messages across the various protocols used by this group, including XMPP, SIP/SIMPLE and AOL’s proprietary protocol. This will allow users of each system in the federation to add AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) and ICQ users to their contact lists, while allowing the latter group to add users of each of the partners to their contact lists.
Why is this important? For the most part, standards-based interoperability between islands of IM users simply does not exist right now, which limits the effectiveness of IM as a productivity or marketing tool. For example, if you’re a consumer products company and you want to allow customers or potential customers to communicate with you via IM, you have to support the “Big Four” (AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and ICQ) and then you’re still not providing access for your entire customer base. Similarly, if you’re a business user of IM, you can’t communicate natively with users of other IM systems among your suppliers, customers, partners and others. Federations like the one AOL has established are a very good substitute for standards-based interoperability and allow IM’s reach to become broader and more transparent.
I believe that while standards-based interoperability will eventually supplant the need for federated networks in the future, to users of the supported systems who can now communicate with others on different systems, it really doesn’t matter – they can now use IM more effectively than they could before.
