After five years of raucous debate and stop-and-start development, the Internet's premier standards-setting body is finalizing a set of protocols that will let companies exchange instant messages with business partners and customers across private IP networks and the Internet.

Dubbed SIMPLE, the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions is essentially finished. The three main documents outlining SIMPLE have received approval from Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) leaders and are awaiting official publication, which is expected in the next few weeks.

Completion of SIMPLE is a milestone for corporate users of instant-messaging systems, who are demanding interoperability. SIMPLE lets users of different instant-messaging software include each other on their buddy lists, detect when they are available to exchange instant messages and initiate real-time chat sessions.

"The financial services industry needs a secure, auditable [instant-messaging] approach, but based on open standards as much as possible," says Mike Sayers, CTO of Reuters, which announced last week a major instant-messaging deployment based on SIMPLE that already has attracted 26,000 users at Reuters and 1,100 other financial services firms. "We are offering a hosted [instant-messaging] service that is firewall friendly, encrypted and based on the SIP extensions known as SIMPLE."

Reuters isn't the only financial services firm supporting the IETF's instant-messaging efforts. Seven U.S. brokerage firms last week announced a coalition called the Financial Services Instant Messaging Association to push instant-messaging vendors to support the IETF's standards. Members of the group include Deutsche Bank, J.P. Morgan Chase, Credit Suisse First Boston, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and UBS Warburg.

As the IETF wraps up its work on SIMPLE, more software vendors are announcing plans to support the protocols. Earlier this month, Lotus began shipping a SIMPLE-compliant instant-messaging gateway with the latest version of Sametime, which is the most popular instant-messaging software among large corporations. SIMPLE is available in Microsoft's Windows Messenger, which comes bundled in Windows XP.

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