January 05, 2004, 1:55 PM — Although instant messaging (IM) can be a convenient way to communicate at work, just as often it seems to end up as a comedy of errors: misinterpretations of tone, sending a personal message to the wrong contact and putting up with the terrible nicknames the guy in sales, a.k.a. "Sultan_of_Sales", feels compelled to use.
While it's no secret that IM has been criticized for being intrusive, an increasing number of companies, including PeopleSoft Inc., IBM Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc., are starting to rely on IM for business communications and have standardized on a particular application in the process. Others have only started to think about where IM could fit into their organization, or support limited use of IM through free download clients.
"IM by and large to date has been a consumer phenomenon," explained Nate Root, senior analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. "It has been something that people have adopted to chat with their friends and their relatives and it's something that has been accidentally co-opted for use within companies."
The most popular consumer platforms for chatting are America Online (AOL) Inc.'s Instant Messenger, Yahoo Inc.'s Instant Messenger, and Microsoft Corp.'s Instant Messenger (MSN). In the enterprise space, Microsoft and IBM and the top two providers of IM solutions. The former offers its SharePoint Services Collaboration platform with an IM client that integrates with its Office Suite, while IBM has its Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing, formerly know as Lotus Sametime.
Throughout September and October of this year, Forrester surveyed about 1,000 companies to see what their purchasing plans were for IM in 2004. Root said 25 percent of these companies already had some sort of IM up and running, about 50 percent didn't have any plans or didn't know what the company's plans were, and the remaining 25 percent were considering purchasing or piloting an IM product in 2004. Two-thirds of these companies had annual revenues greater than US$1 billion, while the remaining 33 percent had annual revenues between $500 million to $1 billion.
"Right now it's kind of like the wild, wild west out there. The companies that are progressive are really going after (IM) and are trying to find solutions very quickly," Root said. "Eventually what should happen is the large platform vendors will come to an agreement on standards like Session Initiation Protocol or SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE), and eventually get some real interoperability between the major network products."
However, it is not easy for companies to get a handle on IM, Root said. Not only is it difficult to know who is using what, but enforcing Draconian policies such as blocking ports so users can't download consumer IM apps is also very difficult. "Employees are very good at finding ways to use the collaboration tools they like," he said. "IM is very much a grassroots phenomenon and once it has started it's hard to get the cat (back) in the bag."
IBM is one example of an early adopter, but it also had the advantage of being a vendor of one of the most popular enterprise IM platform. About five years ago, IBM embarked on an IM pilot project to determine the viability of its use for business. The company asked its employees to volunteer to participate in the program. The response was overwhelming. Expecting only a few thousand, nearly 65,000 employees worldwide said they wanted in, explained Amy Reuss-Caton, product marketing manager, real-time collaboration at IBM in Cambridge, Mass.
The staggering interest shown in this pilot project spurred IBM to get serious about its IM platform. IBM kept at the pilot projects until February 2000, when it rolled out Lotus Sametime enterprise-wide.
Reuss-Caton said IBM estimates that about 225,000 of its 300,000 employees worldwide use IM regularly and the CIO's office has reported peak concurrence levels of 165,000 users.
"IBM Global Services said it was the most successful technology roll-out in the history of the company," she said.
She said that in IBM's experience one general trend with IM is that it tends to start out in sales and support, with other departments following suit. Now she said it is heavily used in the marketing and finance departments.
"It's very compelling if you hear a CFO say 'I can't live without it,'" she said.
Today, IBM's IM users average about three million messages per day, up from 2.5 million messages per day in 2002. The company has also seen a four percent reduction in telephone use, and a reduction in the load on its e-mail servers.
