In a sign that instant messaging interoperability is becoming ever more important to Wall Street users, Communicator's new Hub Connex product offers connections to public IM networks from AOL, Yahoo! and MSN. "It speaks volumes about how much financial services customers need to get access to clients on consumer IM services," said Robert Mahowald, an analyst at International Data Corp.

Previously, Hub IM customers could only send instant messages to other members of the Hub IM network. In a situation similar to when e-mail was in its infancy, most instant messaging providers today keep their customers isolated from those on other networks.

That's not a viable business model on Wall Street, where firms need to stay in instant contact with clients, analysts and business partners at other firms. Street firms currently address this problem in one of three ways. The first is to use an IM solution from a company like IM Logic, Facetime or Akonix, which allows employees to use public IM networks and then archives and monitors the messages for compliance in the background.

Another alternative is to sign business deals with AOL and the other providers to allow connectivity. Reuters has recently reached such an agreement with AOL for its customers. A third alternative is to break into the public IM networks without permission by reverse-engineering their proprietary communication technologies. Both of the latter two options allow companies to put their own interfaces onto the IM systems and for users to have unified IM "buddy" lists.

Eventually, the industry will evolve toward a common standard, said Mahowald, calling the current solutions "Band-Aid" approaches. "I don't think it's a viable long-term model," said Mahowald. "But it will meet a legitimate business need for the next couple of years."

The big problem, he said, is AOL. With some 120 million accounts, it's the gorilla in the marketplace. "AOL is reluctant to give into pressure and relinquish its marketshare lead," he said.

In August, 19 firms formed the Financial Services Instant Messaging Association. "The goal is to pressure vendors to adopt interoperability standards," Navin Rajapakse, assistant VP at Lehman Brothers and one of the members of the 10-plus member board, told CNET. "We want IM to be like e-mail."

Lehman is a customer of Jabber, which offers an enterprise-class, compliant IM product based on the open XMPP standard. The open source community has built Jabber gateways to the public IM networks, said Joe Hildebrand, Jabber's chief architect, by reverse-engineering the networks.

If AOL were to change its network then the Jabber gateways would break, Hildebrand said. But, because Jabber is a server-based IM system, the changes would just need to be made at the central server. And, he said, while AOL, MSN and Yahoo! have tried to make their networks unbreakable, so far, they haven't succeeded.

An AOL spokesman said AOL does not have a public comment about the XMPP gateway technology but added that, besides Reuters, the company has recently signed deals with Akonix and IMlogic.

Jabber doesn't sell the gateways as part of its server product, though help is available for those customers who want to put them in. "We don't bundle them because there are a variety of legal issues," he said. But there's enough call for the product that Communicator supports the Jabber-style XMPP gateways as part of what used to be a completely closed IM system.

This probably isn't a model that can exist forever, said Gary Reifman, product manager for messaging services at Communicator. Like Reuters, Communicator is in talks with the public IM vendors to put in place official, fully legitimate connections. "We expect deals with AOL, Yahoo! and MSN to come through in the future," he said. "In the short term, we allow firms who want to interoperate to connect."