Washington post: "AOL and Hewlett Packard are teaming up to develop and market a new version of America Online's popular instant messaging service that will be tailored specifically for businesses around the world."
Under the terms of the agreement, HP will integrate AOL's services into its global messaging portfolio. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Palo Alto based HP will use AOL's instant messaging system and their 1.5 messages/day traffic and will give them their relationships with businesses and the technical ability to come up with the cutting edge technologies to secure instant messaging.
Yes, that's gonna be a huge market in the next few months and that's why all
three IM giants (Yahoo!, MSN and AOL) are shooting for that.
According to IDC, nearly 65 million workers already use IM products-and that number
is expected to surpass 255 million by 2005.
Yahoo! started the business by rolling out
its new enterprise editition of
Yahoo! messenger a few weeks ago. They claim IM fast, less intrusive and
saves money and they have added great support, security and archiving feature to
make it enterprise-class. Yahoo has already garnered support from BEA Systems, Novell,
Oracle, and Sun Microsystems. There is no price published on the web site but I heard
they charge 30 bucks per year for each client. Timing is advantageous for Yahoo!
since AOL and MSN don't have their products out yet.
I know a lot of start-up companies have their cash ready to buy instant messaging systems
to speed up their sales and development. Yahoo! seems to have a stronger start but
their rivals AOL and MSN haven't been idle at all. AOL, with the new
IM patent and
the very recent agreement with HP is the highest chance to capture the market in
my opinion (despite the fact I personally like Yahoo! to get more share of the market!).
There is no doubt the better business relationships are, the bigger IM market share
will be since the technology is simple, have been around for many years and it's
fairly robust now. Considering this fact, I wouldn't see any chance for small players
like Paltalk or Trillian (which doesn't have its own IM technology). MSN is greating up
to offer a company enterprise version of its MSN messenger later this year and IBM
is pushing its Sometime system to Lotus Notes users, but Yahoo! and AOL are certainly
ahead of them all.
Have you seen farsi version of my
blog?! This article is available there now!
