AOL, Others Crystallize Enterprise IM Plans

Within a week, Microsoft followed suit by unveiling MSN Messenger Connect Service, which uses technology from IMLogic and FaceTime Communications and is aimed at bringing business users into the Microsoft IM fold, said company executives.

The Microsoft offering is slated to ship in the first quarter of 2003 and is part of the company's overall "Greenwich" realtime collaboration push.

Pricing for MSN Messenger Connect will be $24 per user per year, with volume discounts available, according to Microsoft.

AOL's Enterprise AIM, which the company has hinted about for months, is available now. The basic version is still a free download, but IT professionals who want the secure product will pay $34 to $40 per user for it.

AOL is offering the product direct, and it remains unclear how or if systems integrators or partners will be able to sell it.

PresenceWorks plans to resell the "raw AIM" presence into corporations and integrate it into existing infrastructures, said Matt Smith, president of the Alexandria, Va.-based software developer.

"There's an awful lot of fun in getting a bunch of corporate applications that have no instant messaging and almost sneaking IM into them," Smith said. That enables corporate users to add "presence awareness" for colleagues already in the corporate directory. "You can see if Dorothy from human resources is online, and if she is, ping her," he said.

Tens of millions of people have been using AOL's free instant messaging service for years, but the company has faced the ire of consumers by blocking interoperability with rival offerings from Yahoo and Microsoft. Also, it took AOL until early this month to offer interoperability between its own AIM and ICQ instant messaging products. The beta version of AIM 5.1 features ICQ connectivity.

In addition, AOL has not yet said whether it plans to support the emerging Session Initiation Protocol.

On the corporate front, AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo, which announced its own enterprise IM plans, are playing catch-up with Lotus Sametime, which is positioned as a secure, enterprise-ready instant messaging product that can interoperate with AIM. Sametime costs about $38 per user, and volume discounts are available.

Michael Sampson, an analyst at research firm Ferris Networks, said Sametime has a 65 percent share of the 10 million corporate IM users in the market.

But that universe is dwarfed by the millions of consumers using free offerings. Ferris estimates there are about 157 million registered and 32 million active AOL IM users today, compared with about 51 million registered and 31 million active users of Microsoft MSN Messenger, and 40 million registered and 20 million active users of Yahoo Messenger.