"We want IM to be like e-mail."
by Volker Weber
As Wall Street begins to embrace instant messaging, some financial giants are putting a squeeze on the technology's famously fractious service providers.
Read more about instant messaging
Two weeks ago, six top financial institutions met privately with AOL Time Warner, Microsoft, IBM and other leading corporate instant messaging providers and urged them to build communications networks that interoperate. For the Wall Street firms, a lack of IM interoperability has been a source of increasing frustration and a possible pinch on profits.
The meeting, which took place at Merrill Lynch's New York offices, was among the first convened by the Instant Messaging Standards Board (IMSB), a newly created consortium led by financial services firms Lehman Brothers, J.P. Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, UBS and Deutsche Bank.
Formed two months ago to act as ambassador to the IM technology industry, the IMSB plans to make a public announcement about its organization and goals in coming weeks. While the board does not intend to create its own standards, it hopes to nudge IM providers to adopt standards published in the marketplace.
"The goal is to pressurize vendors to adopt interoperability standards," said Navin Rajapakse, assistant vice president at Lehman Brothers and one of the members of the 10-plus member board. "We want IM to be like e-mail."
Comments
I'm feeling "pressurized" ... ready to climb to 23,000 feet :)
