News

Reuters Financial Service to Connect to Microsoft Messenger Network

Reuters and Microsoft on Tuesday announced a deal that is one of the first concrete examples of the way that firms can use the promise of instant messaging technology to enhance their business-to-consumer offerings.

Reuters will link its Reuters Messaging service, which is targeted at the financial industry, to the mass market Microsoft Messenger network in the first quarter of 2004. Reuters claims 50,000 active users per week of its instant message service for financial professionals. Microsoft claims 100 million Microsoft Messenger users. In theory, the combination could allow logged, real-time communications among traders and their clients. What better medium than IM for messages like "Buy!" or "Sell!" that can be immediately acknowledged by a broker?

"Once it is completed, MSN users worldwide will have access to leading financial professionals through a world-class, end-to-end and regulatory-compliant system from Reuters," Blake Irving, Microsoft corporate vice president at MSN, said in a statement.

The deal is not so much a customer win for Microsoft as a supplemental deal. Nor is it an example of progress for those hoping to see bridges built between the different instant messaging networks maintained by Microsoft, Yahoo! and AOL. Reuters was already a customer win back in November when the two companies announced that Reuters would launch its service based on Microsoft's Office Live Communications Server. That new product was previously known as "Greenwich" or Real-time Communication Server. The enterprise instant-messaging server is supposed to serve as an extensible platform for presence capabilities and instant messaging in organizations.

Microsoft and Reuters are using the MSN Messenger Connect for Enterprise service to combine their two networks. Features of the combined service to be launched early next year will include the use of one corporate-controlled identity for financial traders to log onto both the MSN and Reuters Messaging networks, along with regulatory-compliant logging of sessions to a Microsoft SQL Server database and the ability of organizations to own and manage their corporate IM identities through the system.

The MSN Messenger Connect for Enterprise service exists to help organizations extend corporate IM networks to the Microsoft Messenger network.

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

Featured

  • Broadcom Revamps VMware Partner Program Again

    Broadcom recently announced a significant update regarding its VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) program, coinciding with the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, a key component in Broadcom’s private cloud strategy.

  • Closeup of the new Copilot keyboard key

    Microsoft Updates Copilot To Add Context-Sensitive Agents to Teams, SharePoint

    Microsoft has rolled out a new public preview for collaborative "always on" agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot, bringing enhanced, context-aware tools into Teams channels, meetings, SharePoint sites, Planner workstreams and Viva Engage communities.

  • Windows 365 Cloud Apps Now Available for Public Preview

    Microsoft announced this week that Windows 365 Cloud Apps are now available for public preview. This aims to allow IT administrators to stream individual Windows applications from the cloud, removing the need to assign Cloud PCs to every user.

  • Report: Security Initiatives Can't Keep Pace with Cloud, AI Boom

    The increasingly fast adoption of hybrid, multicloud, and AI systems is easily outgrowing existing security measures, according to a recent global survey by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and exposure management firm Tenable.

Most   Popular