AOL Finally Goes Corporate With Enterprise Instant Messaging

The Enterprise AIM game plan has been public since last spring when AOL said it was working with Verisign on encrypted instant messaging. The consumer product has been downloaded by tens of millions of Web surfers, many of whom have slipped it onto their corporate PCs.

The basic version is still a free download, but IT pros who want the secure product will pay up to $30 per user for that, an AOL spokesman said. The bulk of sales will be direct through AOL.

PresenceWorks can resell the "raw AIM" presence into corporations and integrate it into existing infrastructure, said Matt Smith, president of the Alexandria, Virg. company. "There's an awful lot of fun in getting a bunch of corporate apps that have no IM and almost sneaking IM into them. We retrofit IM," he noted. That enables corporate users to add "presence awareness" to the colleagues already on the corporate directory. "You can see if Dorothy from HR is online and if she is, ping her," he noted.

AOL was a trailblazer in instant messaging, which it has offered as a free service for years. But the company has faced the ire of consumers by blocking interoperability between its products and other free instant messaging offerings from Yahoo and Microsoft. And, it took AOL until last week to finally offer interoperability between its own AIM and ICQ instant messaging products. AIM Version 5.1 beta features ICQ connectivity.

AOL also appears to have backed off stated plans to support the emerging SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and SIMPLE protocols, observers said.

On the corporate instant messaging front, AOL faces Lotus Sametime, which Lotus positions as a secure, enterprise-ready version of instant messaging that can interoperate with AIM. Sametime costs about $38 per user with volume discounts available.

Analyst Michael Sampson of Ferris said Sametime has a 65 percent share of the ten million corporate IM users in the market today. But that universe is dwarved by the millions of consumers on free instant messaging offerings. Ferris estimates there are some 32 million active AIM users today, compared to about 31 million for Microsoft MSN Messenger; 20 million for Yahoo Messenger; and 9 million AOL ICQ users.

Microsoft, in an about-face from previous plans, is building what it says will be a secure collaboration foundation, including instant messaging, into its upcoming Windows.Net server (See Related Story.)

Integrators say instant messaging has taken root in enterprises of all sizes, but there are huge worries about security and the ability instant messaging gives users to send internal documents outside the company.

"AOL is delivering enterprise instant messaging essentials like security and authentication, [running over its existing and reliable infrastructure. AOL should be able to do this better than its competitors and partners. Unfortunately, AOL is late and its approach is not very open to developers. I'd like to see them support such standards as SIP and SIMPLE," said Dana Gardner, analyst with The Aberdeen Group.

Gardner said IBM/Lotus and Microsoft have a better vision of how instant messaging can benefit businesses over the next five years.

AOL is also in the unenviable position of trying to persuade millions of AIM customers to move from a freebie to a fee-based service. For that, the company needs "a compelling, rather than just competitive," price model, Gardner said.