I have heard from several recently separated employees of Ikimbo, that the instant messaging application pioneer has recently decided to close down. CEO Glen Hellman has been unavailable for comment.

The company's Agenda product won the coveted Gold Lotus Advisor Editors' Choice Award in February of 2003.

AGENDA is tightly integrated with Lotus Sametime, which handles the real-time notification and coordination of a response to a critical situation. Organizations can define an "agenda" to follow when a crisis occurs, and AGENDA monitors systems, such as ERP systems, for conditions that warrant a crisis. If a crisis condition exists, the "agenda" for that crisis is followed and the person(s) responsible are notified via Sametime of the situation. More importantly, AGENDA allows people to reach out to underlying systems once a decision has been made and tell the system(s) what action to take. This key step is called "closing the loop" on critical events.

The demise of the company is an emotional blow for me, since I served most recently as EVP there, leaving just after the receipt of the Lotus Advisor award, although I continued on as an occasionaly advisor.

Ikimbo is a company that was simply too early for the market. A product like Agenda would make sense once some form of interoperability is available to the enterprise customers that it targetted. [Note: I will be interviewing various folks at Microsoft in the next few days about their recent announcement about interoperability with AIM and Yahoo networks. Such a platform will lead to the re-emergence of the ideas that motivated Ikimbo and Agenda.]