* No more ‘Which IM system are you on?’
In the early days of the telephone it was not uncommon to find three telephone booths on a street corner. Because of a lack of interoperability among early telephone networks, a caller had to choose the correct telephone system to call someone. The situation with instant messaging today is no different – AIM users cannot natively communicate with Yahoo Messenger users, who cannot natively communicate with Live Communication Server users, and so forth.
To remedy this situation, AOL has established a ‘Clearinghouse,’ essentially an IM translation and routing service designed to connect islands of IM users that otherwise would not be able to communicate with each other natively. The Clearinghouse will allow enterprises that have deployed Microsoft Live Communication Server 2005 to communicate with other LCS customers, AOL’s IM customer base, Reuters Messaging users and any other IM provider that becomes a Clearinghouse partner. In short, the Clearinghouse will act as a sort of gateway to translate between competing IM protocols and provide routing services between IM systems.
This is a major step forward because it allows competing IM systems to interoperate more or less seamlessly. Interoperability is crucial to moving IM adoption forward, particularly in business-to-consumer (B2C) applications. Without true interoperability, customer-facing organizations that want to provide support via IM must either use a Web-based interface that they provide or they must support multiple IM clients.
B2C applications of IM offer an enormous potential for cost savings and improved customer support because of the improved user experience for many types of support and because of the dramatically lower costs of providing this support. For example, a telephone customer service representative can support only one customer at a time. However, the same representative using IM can support four or more customers simultaneously. Further, IM in a B2C application would allow customers to interact with back-end applications directly through their IM client instead of having to navigate a series of voice prompts via a telephone interface.
All in all, interoperability – whether natively enabled through standards or provided through a third party like AOL’s Clearinghouse – is going to be a major driver for moving IM forward in the enterprise.
