November 5, 2001
"The tens of millions of devotees of instant messaging (IM) should not expect needed interoperability standards for 18 to 24 months," according to David Ferris, founder-president of Ferris Research, specialists in evaluating messaging systems and related collaborative technologies based here.
Ferris Research has just published "Instant Messaging and Presence Standards," based on a teleconference among five industry experts on this subject held on October 17th. The report has been distributed electronically to the many subscribers to Ferris' information service.
The experts emphasized that the principal vendors of IM services -- AOL, MSN and Yahoo! -- block interoperability as a means of maintaining their markets. Even if the groups pressing for standards achieve some agreement, it would be difficult for the three to scale their services up for interoperability. Discussions on standards have been progressing. It appears that Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and SIP for Instant Messaging & Presence Leveraging (SIMPLE) will prevail. The forthcoming Windows Messenger client in Microsoft's new Windows XP operating system is based on SIP and AOL tested server-server interoperability with Lotus' Sametime real-time communications and IM server using SIMPLE. However, the IM industry is still 18 to 24 months away from adoption of these standards. On the other hand, interoperability between corporate IM services and consumer IM services is only 6 to 12 months away because it's easier to negotiate business relationships between vendors of corporate IM products and consumer IM networks.
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