IM interoperability key to market potential

BOSTON (Telephony) -- With all its potential for advanced communications services and new revenue opportunities, instant messaging will remain a niche application until companies providing the service reach interoperability, according to several speakers at the Presence and Instant Messaging Conferencing being held this week in Boston.

There is so much potential in the underlying technology in fact, that the FCC is more concerned about access to the huge databases built by big players like America Online, MSN and Yahoo!, according to Kathy Brown, former chief of staff to former FCC chairman William Kennard.

“IM is a mere application of the names and presence database,” she said, noting that the FCC only placed interoperability requirements on the AOL/Time Warner merger as it relates to advanced services using that database.

However until all IM software vendors can interoperate, the industry will continue to operate as islands. IM Unified, a group of a few dozen vendors currently is working on a solution that will allow the databases to communicate with each other, but it’s not the ultimate answer, said Geoff Ralston, general manager at Yahoo!

“There are some hard problems hooking up,” he said. “The good news here is the short-term bridge solutions will provide an option for server-based interoperability.”

But setting a timetable for even the most basic solution is difficult, because all the major players have different motivations, he said.

David Gurle, product unit manager with Microsoft, said the final round of discussions on the interoperability will happen within the next two weeks, but he wasn’t sure when a solution would hit the market. MSN has seen the customer base for its IM product grow 67% since last November to 36 million users. Of those, about 25% are using IM to make PC-to-phone calls. Growing that further is going to require interoperability, he said.

“From a Microsoft perspective we are investing and focusing on interoperability,” he said. “The bar is very high.”