By Melanie Turek, Nemertes Research Inc.
April 18, 2005

AOL’s (NYSE: TWX) recent launch of its IM Federation Partner Program promises to make IM federation more of a reality for more enterprises, and that’s good news given the trend we see among companies that want their employees to IM customers, partners and suppliers. Nemertes’ research shows that 70% of IT executives want vendors to focus on interoperability in the near future.

Four privately held enterprise IM vendors—Antepo, Jabber, Omnipod and Parlano—can now give enterprise customers certificate-based, encrypted access to the AIM and ICQ IM services, via the AOL Federation Gateway. The Gateway works as a translation engine between SIP/SIMPLE, XMPP and AOL’s proprietary messaging system. Enterprise users can communicate with people outside their organizations on AOL without having to use an AOL screen name, and without giving up the security and management controls that come with their enterprise IM system. Federation with other IM systems is also being tested, so that an Antepo user could message a Jabber user, for instance.

The news gives companies more alternatives to using Microsoft’s Live Communications Server. It also puts another nail in the coffin of the IM Gateway vendors (Akonix, FaceTime and IMlogic), whose differentiator has increasingly been the ability to offer interoperability; as that gap closes, so does their value add.

The complete Impact Analysis is available to Nemertes clients. For more information, please contact Christine Zimmerman at christine@nemertes.com [1]