Financial companies rally for IM standards, compatibility

Computerworld - With instant messaging growing in importance as a tool for business, seven Wall Street financial services companies have joined forces to try to pressure vendors to standardize the software for compatibility.
In an announcement yesterday, the seven firms said they have formed the Financial Services Instant Messaging Association (FIMA) to work with IM software vendors on interoperability, user authentication, security and audit-trail needs in the products.
The group, created in July, was initially called the Instant Messaging Standards Board (IMSB), but the name was changed because the group isn't an official standards body.
FIMA includes representatives from Credit Suisse, First Boston, Deutsche Bank, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch & Co., Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. and UBS Warburg.
Ursula Mills, a spokesman for London-based UBS Warburg and co-chairman of FIMA, said the problem the companies face is that workers and customers all use different IM clients to communicate. Since those clients aren't compatible, users need to have multiple IM applications running on their computers, wasting desktop resources and making things more complicated, she said.
"What we're trying to achieve is basically non-product-specific connectivity," Mills said.
In August, FIMA met with IM vendors including Microsoft Corp., America Online Inc., Jabber Inc., FaceTime Inc. and Reuters to talk about the need for secure and compatible enterprise-ready IM products, Mills said. Those talks continue.
In the long term, the group plans to press vendors for software that uses uniform protocols for compatibility, with one sign-on for access to all of the IM clients. That will take time, Mills admitted. In the meantime, FIMA hopes to see vendors working together on gateways that allow interoperability until protocols are established and followed.
"We're going to individual vendors as one body, one voice," she said.
FIMA is open to all participants who will promote upcoming IM standards from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
Analysts say the financial services businesses could have the clout to make compatibility happen.
"I think this makes a tremendous amount of sense," said Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research Inc. in Black Diamond, Wash. "Industry associations like this putting the pressure on, I think, is a great idea.
"The growth of IM is continuing, but its real growth is being hampered by the lack of interoperability," Osterman said.
Robert Mahowald, an analyst at IDC in Framingham, Mass., agreed. "When you've got money behind an initiative, it's amazing the kinds of results and pressure you get," he said. "Because the financial services industry is an early adopter,they've got some clout."
The problem, he said, is that IM interoperability isn't a technical issue for IM vendors. "It's a business issue," he said. And what is important to them, Mahowald said, is how they will be able to make money off of their investments in IM technologies in the long term.