Yahoo to Discontinue Support for the Sametime Gateway

There have been rumblings about this for a while, but Yahoo will be discontinuing their support for the Sametime Gateway, I received this notice from IBM today. Hello!  This email contains important information about changes to IBM Sametime and Yahoo! interoperability in 2011. Our records show that at one point your company registered your IBM Lotus Sametime Gateway for interoperability with the Yahoo! Messenger service. Today, your Lotus Sametime Gateway integrates directly with the Yahoo! Messenger servers through single sign-on capability, letting your employees use their corporate Sametime identity to exchange presence information and text chats with Yahoo! Messenger users. Yahoo! Inc. has notified IBM that it intends to discontinue this method of interoperability in the near future. Sametime interoperability with the Yahoo! Messenger service is currently scheduled to be discontinued in January 2011, however IBM is in discussions with Yahoo to extend this date.  We are also exploring other ways to provide Sametime interoperability with the Yahoo! Messenger service and hope to have an alternative before Gateway services are discontinued. IBM intends to host an Open Mic conference call on Wednesday, 10 November, from 10am to 10:30am Eastern Standard Time (USA east coast time), during which we will share more information and address your questions about this change.  The Open Mic details will be added to the Lotus Support Technical Exchange page closer to the event.  In addition, we will keep you informed of any further changes by e-mail or by a News item on the Lotus Sametime Support site. Please note that the Sametime Gateway will continue to function as normal for AOL, Google, Microsoft OCS and other Sametime communities.

9 Responses to Yahoo to Discontinue Support for the Sametime Gateway
  1. Roger Lim
    October 27, 2010 | 5:29 pm

    I guess now it’s official. However, I think this is counter-productive for Yahoo to start cutting themselves off from the mass community. It seems that the open environment should encourage more people to embrace their IM gateway, not the opposite.

  2. Carl Tyler
    October 27, 2010 | 6:09 pm

    It looks to me like Yahoo want some more money, and they want IBM customers to pressure IBM to keep the connection alive.

  3. Giulio
    October 27, 2010 | 6:54 pm

    While we’re speculating why Yahoo is cutting the service for Sametime…

    Yahoo offers interoperability with a number of providers

    { Link }

    IBM will not be one of them soon. If the trends elsewhere around the globe are the same as Australia, it would seem Yahoo have also seen the decline in connections with Sametime, and see no value in continuing to support it.

    It’s pretty ugly out there at the moment for Lotus.

  4. John Del Pizzo
    October 27, 2010 | 8:01 pm

    For the record… this was neither a money issue nor Yahoo singling out Sametime. They have articulated (to us) a desire to move away from SIP-based identity federation in general. We’ll go into our plans to address this on the open mike call on the 10th.

  5. Mitch Cohen
    October 27, 2010 | 8:05 pm

    John thanks for chiming in, my understanding is that this decision by Yahoo impacts a good number of their federation agreements and is not at all specific to Lotus or Sametime

  6. Carl Tyler
    October 27, 2010 | 9:17 pm

    @4 Thanks John. You’ve now taken all the fun out of speculating Emoticon

  7. Giulio
    October 28, 2010 | 2:48 am

    @4. Dang! Here I was thinking that this was just another reflection of the global demise of the Lotus user base. I’ll have to find another example… 😉

  8. John Del Pizzo
    October 28, 2010 | 9:24 am

    Sorry guys… didn’t mean to spoil the fun. Emoticon Feel free to speculate on when Mitch’s NY Giants are going to collapse and show the league what kind of team they really are.

  9. Mitch Cohen
    October 28, 2010 | 9:29 am

    Ouch… Cheap shot John :), though I just checked the standings again to see which team is actually on top of the division standings!