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!