IBM And AOL Time Warner Team To Improve Business IMIBM And AOL Time Warner Team To Improve Business IM

IBM and AOL Time Warner are trying to improve interoperability of corporate instant-messaging networks as part of a joint pilot test the companies unveiled this week. IBM's Lotus Software unit had previously worked with AOL to make it possible for users of the Lotus Sametime and AOL Instant Messenger programs to combine their buddy lists. This test will attempt to deepen that integration for businesses that are using Sametime and AOL's newer AIM Enterprise Gateway offering.

Essentially, the goal is to make it possible for Sametime users to identify themselves on the AOL network based on the directory information used by Sametime, says Jeremy Dies, Lotus' offering manager for advanced collaboration. This would allow business users to be identified by authenticated names rather than their AOL screen names when messaging other AOL users. The idea is to provide an additional level of security when Sametime users have a business-related need to communicate with contacts using the AIM Enterprise Gateway network, says Dies.

For example, in the current setup, if a financial-services professional wants to contact an institutional client that doesn't have access to Sametime, he or she can instant message the client using an AOL client, but his or her name will show up as an AOL screen name, which may raise security concerns for the client's employer. By tapping the directory used by Sametime, the financial-services rep will be identified by a more official directory listing, making it clear the message is business-related.

The companies haven't set a specific timeline for the completion of the test and the release of subsequent integration tools for customers, but Dies says the goal is to offer those tools in the short term.

Interoperability has been seen as the major stumbling block preventing widespread business adoption of IM, with the consumer IM providers--most notably AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo--reluctant to share their valuable user communities. But Dies says interoperability is becoming less of a concern as more business-specific IM offerings become available, all leveraging the Session Initiation Protocol for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (Simple) standard that's modeled after the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol used by E-mail systems.

In a research note on the effort, Michael Sampson, an analyst with Ferris Research, urged the companies to forget the test and put the integration on the fast track. He says there's a lot of desire among companies to provide IT-controlled, single-client access to both a private and a public IM network. "This is the Holy Grail of enterprise IM," Sampson wrote.

Among the business IM offerings on the market are Sametime, AIM Enterprise Gateway, WiredRed's e/pop, and Reuters Messaging. Yahoo also has a service in the works.