Endeavors Technology says it wants to do what the public instant messaging (IM) network operators have not yet accomplished: establish full interoperability among their networks.
While that plan is a bit further down the line for the company, it is releasing in the meantime a secure IM platform for America Online's AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) and MSN Messenger that also brings compliance features to enterprises buying the system.
Endeavors' Magi Secure IM singularly routes popular IM products through a fully compliant and auditable cross-enterprise communications proxy -- a "connection broker," Endeavors officials said in a product briefing with InstantMessagingPlanet. This broker is what will ultimately enable interoperability among all of the public IM networks for companies buying and using the system, although it is used in all of the Magi Secure IM product line.
Only public presence and discovery are published in the public IM directories with Magi Secure IM. Private messages behind the firewall, meantime, are sent directly peer-to- peer with SSL encryption. When messages are transmitted between two firewall- and Magi-enabled locations via the Internet, the traffic is mutually authenticated using corporate X.509 certificates. The company controlled connection broker provides a secure end-to-end security checkpoint for cross-site traffic uses by welding two outgoing SSL calls together, so no insecure or unauthorized traffic is transmitted, Endeavors also said.
When the entire line is rolled out, Magi Secure IM will work with independent IM clients in their unchanged native mode. This will let enterprises to gain full control over employee messaging and chat sessions, no matter what IM environment is being used, officials said.
Magi Secure IM "plugs in" to popular IM network clients, and is transparent to the user -- the latter of which is a big selling point, Endeavors said. Because the system supports the features and functionality of commercial IM products, there's no training, infrastructure change or switching costs involved in getting IM back under an IT administrator's control.
Another big feature of Magi Secure IM is its ability to look up corporate identities from popular IM buddy names and underwrite them with strong Public Key Infrastructure based authentications. This provides protection against identity spoofing, and allows for financial grade non-repudiation, tracking, and auditing.
Other Magi Secure IM features include content encryption, virus protection through an existing desktop virus checker or a centrally managed virus-protection system, and message tracking and archiving that provides for compliance and usage reporting.
While specific products are now available for AIM and MSN Messenger, a similar product for Yahoo is expected to hit the market later this year, as is the full interoperability product, Endeavors said. The company is based in Irvine, Calif., and has offices in the U.S. and Europe.
Questions, concerns and desire surrounding IM interoperability have abounded since the different public IM networks were launched. ICQ is the granddaddy of them all, while AIM has the largest audience. Early attempts by Microsoft to hook up an earlier iteration of MSN Messenger with AIM were rebuked by AOL.
Support is building for at least one standard. In its enterprise products, Microsoft supports the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and its associated SIMPLE (SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions). Yahoo, meantime, has signaled its interest in SIP and SIMPLE.
A wrench was thrown into the SIP/SIMPLE works earlier this year, though, when AOL said it would abandon its works for server-to-server interoperability, saying such efforts had gotten to be too costly. Instead, it would seek to sign agreements with alternate IM operators to provide their users direct access to the AIM network. Before that decision, AOL had been on record as supporting the SIP/SIMPLE standard.
Programs like Trillian and Trillian Pro work among all of the public IM networks, but they do not let a person on Yahoo Messenger IM with someone on AIM. And Trillian/Trillian Pro are not authorized to use networks like AOL's -- earlier this year, AOL made several attempts to block Trillian users from the AIM network.
The yearning for interoperability is growing in the enterprise space. Just last week, a new financial-services group formed to push the IM industry to adopt a standard. A total of seven firms -- Credit Suisse First Boston, Deutsche Bank, J.P. Morgan Chase, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and UBS Warburg -- started the Financial Services Instant Messaging Association (FIMA).
FIMA says it is non-partisan, and is open to any company that wishes to promote Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) IM standards and protocols within the financial services community. By endorsing IETF instant-messaging standards, FIMA said it wants to promote "interoperability and beneficial competition among instant-messaging vendors."
Endeavors, not surprisingly, said it is a "founding technology vendor" with FIMA.
Bob Woods is the managing editor of InstantMessagingPlanet.
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