Research indicates 70% of IT executives want vendors to focus on interoperability in the near future, but there's a dark side to all this.

By Melanie Turek, Nemertes Research
Messaging Pipeline
April 20, 2005

AOL's recent launch of its IM Federation Partner Program promises to make the federalization of instant messaging more of a reality for more enterprises.

That's the good news, given the trend we see among companies that want their employees to IM customers, partners and suppliers. And our work at Nemertes Research indicates 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 AOL Instant Messaging (AIM) and ICQ instant messaging services, using the AOL Federation Gateway. The Gateway works as a translation engine between SIP/SIMPLE, XMPP and AOL's proprietary messaging system.