AT&T Managed Instant Messenger

The AT&T MIM offering appears to be a managed Jabber server, hosted on an AT&T server in their Internet facility, using an AT&T branded version of the commercial JIM client.

The AT&T pricing appears reasonable (compared to the software license quotes we have from Jabber). The AT&T offering appears to be for a "virtual server", where different customers share not only the same hardware, but also the same Jabber server instance. This presents security and performance issues.

Many of the key benefits of corporate IM are derived from hosting the messaging server(s) in-house (LDAP integration, security, reliability, etc). Outsourced IM service hosted on the Internet negates many of these benefits.