Yahoo announced its intention to discontinue its Business Messenger on Friday, and AOL followed suit yesterday, saying AIM Enterprise Gateway is being end-of-lifed. Neither company revealed how many customers they had, but it was evidently not enough in both cases.
Both firms are restructuring their IM efforts targeting corporate users to leverage their existing consumer IM clients, which are already very widely deployed on desktops, residential or corporate, throughout the world.
AOL earlier this month announced AIM Business Services. AIM users will be able to launch voice over IP sessions or web conferencing meetings, under partnerships between AOL and Lightbridge and WebEx respectively.
Lisa Pollock Mann, senior director of Yahoo Messenger said in a statement: We have reorganized our instant messaging business to optimize our ability to leverage the Yahoo! network, whether our customers are at work or at home.
AOL’s designated heir for the Enterprise Gateway product is IMLogic Inc, a pureplay IM software developer. IMLogic is now offering licenses and free migration services from AOL to IMLogic platforms, under a deal inked with AOL.
The companies both got into enterprise IM at about the same time as Microsoft Corp in 2002. The idea was that companies already have many employees using IM, and that bringing such communications under control could add security and management capabilities.
