Yahoo! Joins Business IM Race
Yahoo! has officially leaped into the emerging market for secured, real-time communication solutions. Its new software, dubbed Yahoo! Business Messenger, sustained months of beta testing prior to being quietly unveiled last week.
Yahoo! works WebEx Communications virtual conferencing software as well as VeriSign security attributes into its client, bolstering its competitiveness and overall appeal against its chief rivals Microsoft and AOL.
Yahoo! sees its product as a network-based service rather than traditional out of the box software. The messaging component is subscription-based, fixed to one year periods. Customers pay per seat compounded with the additional cost of WebEx's features, priced per minute of use.
Both Microsoft and Time Warner's America Online unit have already established a presence in the business IM market.
Microsoft's solution is currently locked into the Windows platform, in contrast to Yahoo! and AOL offerings that support multiple platforms on the backend.
"Yahoo!'s move into corporate IM/Web conferencing offers a straightforward alternative for companies that don't run Windows. While the Yahoo! business IM client needs Windows, the back-end software supports Linux, Solaris and Windows, as well as several directories and databases. Likewise, WebEx is available for multiple operating systems. By contrast, Office Live products are designed for Windows," Joe Wilcox a senior analyst at Jupiter Research told BetaNews.
Microsoft offers up Office Live Communications Server 2003 -- formerly code-named Greenwich -- coupled with Office Live Meeting 2003 (formerly PlaceWare), and a trio of clients including Windows Messenger, MSN Messenger and NetMeeting.
America Online offers its own RTC enterprise solution encompassing a convergence of products ranging from content and identity management servers -- namely the AIM Enterprise Gateway 2.0 -- to the encryption friendly AIM 5.2 client. AOL's software supports the versatile Linux operating system as well.
Details on AOL's future efforts remained largely unknown, due in part to regulatory shackles imposed on the company by the FCC following its marriage -- and brief honeymoon -- to Time Warner in 2001.
A recent beta version of AIM 5.5, provides a glimpse at the product's future roadmap. Beta build 3415 provides event triggered pop-up notifications similar to those seen in Microsoft's IM clients. For instance, a small transparent window will pop up when a buddy comes online.
The beta release, geared toward the consumer end, incorporates new services such as AIM Games. A "Games" button launches a window filled with titles to select, from which a user can invite a buddy to join in the fun. Some dialogs have also been refreshed.
On a more serious note, AOL has enabled IM forwarding to mobile devices. The company also recently announced that it will partner with Reuters to offer instant messaging connectivity for Reuters Messaging and AOL Instant Messenger users.
More information on Yahoo! Business Messenger is available on the product's Web site.