When AOL announced earlier this week that it would abandon its AIM Enterprise Gateway product, the company also said it struck a deal with instant messaging gateway technology vendor IMlogic to help move existing AIM Enterprise Gateway users to IMlogic’s offering.This agreement gave AIM Enterprise Gateway customers a free license to IMlogic’s IM Manager gateway product; a free license to IMlogic’s IM Linkage for developing IM apps; and free migration services to substitute the AIM Enterprise Gateway with IM Manager and install IM Linkage.“The IMlogic products will cover our existing users for their current functionality and beyond,” AOL’s Brian Curry said, in an interview with IDG News Service reporter Juan Carlos Perez. This struck me as a curious move given that AOL’s AIM Enterprise Gateway was built by IMlogic’s competitor FaceTime Communications. From my perspective, wouldn’t it make more sense for AOL to cut this kind of deal with FaceTime? That way, AOL’s customers could stay with the same root technology, essentially upgrading from a single network solution that FaceTime built for AOL to an offering that supports multiple networks.“All the AIM Enterprise Gateway is our IM Auditor product with support for only AOL’s network in it,” said Christopher Dean, FaceTime’s senior vice president of marketing and business development.Dean said that IMlogic paid for the migration deal with AOL. “This is a paid endorsement of IMlogic and doesn’t guarantee IMlogic a single customer,” he said. “AOL and IMlogic came to a monetary agreement.”Jon Sakoda, vice president of products at IMlogic didn’t have a comment about the financial terms to the deal, if there were any. He didn’t like the suggestion that IMlogic was paying for advertising with the migration plan.Maybe this isn’t such a shocking charge. Maybe these kind of migration deals are always a business arrangement, rather than a technology decision. I haven’t heard back yet from AOL, so I can’t yet add their side to the story. But my guess is AOL will provide a diplomatic response that focuses on the benefits of IMlogic’s products.IMlogic’s Sakoda said his company’s migration agreement with AOL is the best option for AIM Enterprise customers because AOL is putting its resources behind it.“AOL is contributing network services, migration services, a free license for network services exclusively for customers who upgrade to [IMlogic’s] solutions,” Sakoda said. “Customers are migrating off of the AIM Gateway but they are getting more functionality and more compliance and management features,” Sakoda added. “And they are getting this whole world of application development with our IM Linkage technology.”Whatever the terms of the deal actually were, the race is now on for AOL’s former customers.FaceTime has announced its own migration special for customers of the AIM Enterprise Gateway, Dean said. “We’ve matched and exceeded [AOL’s and IMlogic’s] offer,” Dean said.FaceTime’s offer gives a free upgrade to its IM Auditor, free migration services, and preferred pricing, Dean said.“We will win the vast majority of these migrations,” Dean said. “It is the easiest migration and it is the same technology. Some customers are miffed at presumption that they would want to switch products.” He was quick to add that FaceTime still has a “very strong” relationship with AOL, and has several joint initiatives in the works.AOL’s enterprise effort didn’t succeed because it was a single network solution, Dean said.“Enterprises are heterogeneous network environments so selling a single network solution doesn’t meet pain points of the enterprise,” he said. AOL has said it has about 150 AIM Enterprise customers.Dean said that FaceTime has spoken with every customer, and has already had more than five migrations.When asked how FaceTime execs reacted to see AOL officially sanctioning migration to its competitor’s product, Dean said “I don’t know that we were completely happy about it. But it is an outcome that IMlogic will have spent a lot of money and got almost nothing.” Technology Industry