Thomson Reuters has partnered with Microsoft, Cisco and IBM to enable cross-platform communication across proprietary instant messaging systems.
Reuters Messaging (RM) Interchange is being billed as a global instant messaging hub, connecting Thomson Reuters RM with Cisco's Jabber XCP, IBM Lotus' Sametime and Microsoft's LCS/OCS. Users connected to the hub will be listed on an inter-company community directory.
David Gurle, global head of collaboration services at Thomson Reuters says: "Over the last few years IM has matured and become the nerve system of many financial institutions to conduct business decisions, progressively replacing email. However, corporate IM deployments have not yet fully used their potential to enable their users to reach their counterparts and customers in other organisations."
Unlike existing federation gateways, says Gurle, RM Interchange is the first to enable businesses worldwide to federate without the need to establish individual links between them.