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By Anthony Plewes, 24 September 2003 08:43

COMMENT Instant messaging has made its way into the enterprise unnoticed by the IT department. And while it is here to stay, its use needs to be more tightly controlled. Anthony Plewes assesses enterprise IM options. Instant messaging use has exploded over the last 18 months. Recent research from analysts Radicati estimates that there are already 590 million active global IM accounts, and projects this to increase to 1.4 billion within four years. Migration from desktops to mobiles and PDAs is partially responsible. Although this boom is being most visibly driven by consumers, users in enterprises have not been slow to cotton on to its advantages. Radicati claims that there are already 52 million corporate IM accounts and that this is set to increase nearly seven-fold to 349 million by 2007. Enterprise users are finding IM particularly useful for time-critical applications. However, the majority of enterprise IM use appears to be ad-hoc rather than centrally planned. Out of the 50 enterprises that Radicati interviewed, 70 per cent said that they believed people in their organisation were using IM but only 26 per cent of companies had standardised on a specific company-wide solution. The key concern that companies have is security, while many are still to be persuaded of any added value another communications channel might bring. Financial services in an instant This trend of bottom-up deployment is mirrored by research carried out by Vanson Bourne in the UK on IM usage in the financial services industry. It found that IM was being used predominantly by front-office employees such as brokers and traders, who have the most to gain from being able to communicate in real-time in an open environment. As use of IM has largely grown outside of the control of the IT department it comes as little surprise that Vanson Borne found that two of the three most used IM systems are the public networks MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. The other main network is the financial-services focused Reuters Messaging. The research also found that interoperability was not as important an issue as would be expected. Users often had more than one IM client and used each one for a specific purpose. For example, traders in the energy market had informally standardised on the Yahoo platform. Headache to manage This unregulated use of IM throws up all sorts of potential problems for the financial services industry. Financial institutions in the US are now required by law to audit and track all electronic messages and these explicitly include IM. Although the FSA is not yet that prescriptive in the UK, companies need to make sure that IM is not being used to break other regulations or policies. "Enterprises do not have a centralised tool for controlling IM, which has really appeared through the backdoor," explains Christopher Dean, senior VP of business development for Facetime, an IM management software developer. "This raises a number of concerns for them including information and network security." IT departments need to grasp the nettle and ensure that IM is being used properly and addresses three key requirements. First, is the ability to record and audit IM conversations across public and private networks. Second, is to reconcile IM screen names against corporate credentials. And finally, there is the need to prevent inappropriate IM usage or disclosure of restricted company information. There are two main options for enterprises looking to manage their IM usage. The first is to standardise on a single enterprise IM platform and enforce usage of that particular client and the second is to install a management layer to support a number of different clients. All of the consumer IM vendors are eying the enterprise space with AOL in particular establishing relationships with a number of enterprise vendors, and even a recent tie-up with Reuters. Microsoft is preparing for a concerted assault on the market with its enterprise messaging solution, the Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2003. "We have had a number of different clients in the past," says Mike Pryke-Smith, Office marketing manager at Microsoft. "MSN Messenger has focused on the consumer, while Windows Messenger with Office will focus on enterprise." The product will be launched in October. Yahoo! even launched its 'IM for the suits' at the start of the year. Enterprise solutions While Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo may be ubiquitous in the consumer space, their enterprise products come up against a number of established players, including IBM Lotus Instant Messaging, Sun ONE Instant Messaging, Ipswitch Instant Messaging and the Reuters Messaging product. All of the enterprise products address the key requirements such as logging, authentication and security. And as authentication should be integrated with an enterprise’s existing LDAP directory system, this interface will be an important criterion. Companies also need to decide on how the IM application will be used. For example, IBM Lotus has recently extended the reach of its IM product with support for clients including Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) - which is used in devices such as BlackBerry – as well as support for the Palm OS and Microsoft PocketPC. Lotus also offers support for WAP and SMS-based messaging. Currently IBM Lotus enjoys a worldwide lead in the enterprise market claims Genelle Hung, market analyst with the Radicati Group. "It enjoys this overwhelming market share largely due to the fact that it was one of the first movers into the corporate IM arena and because it can leverage the enormous resources of IBM." However, Hung says that Lotus' days of dominance may be numbered with the emergence of enterprise versions of consumer IM software. It may not be necessary to standardise on one platform. It is possible to deploy a management layer over existing IM networks to offer similar enterprise functionality. "There are much more public IM clients in use in businesses than enterprise IM solutions," says Facetime’s Dean. "For the foreseeable future, the public clients will continue to dominate in the enterprise." Facetime offers a management layer to integrate with the company directory and provide enterprise functionality such as security and logging. Application integration Instant messaging is being tipped to spawn a whole new generation of collaborative products. For example, Microsoft’s Pryke-Smith says that Office Live will be extended so that projects can have enhanced presence information attached to them, such as buddy lists for all the people working on a particular document. Microsoft is already integrating presence information in Sharepoint so that workers can initiate collaboration sessions from within the portal. Indeed, integrating presence information with portals looks like being a key direction, and Facetime, for example, has already inked deals with BEA and Oracle. "Enterprise decision-makers need to be made aware of the fact that IM can be a very key strategic business tool to improve efficiency and productivity in the workplace," explains Hung. "Not just IM on its own but also the concept of ‘presence’ technology that can be integrated into a number of corporate applications." Other typical applications would be to integrate IM with enterprise software such as SAP. For example, when someone needs help raising a purchase order they could simply click on a button within the application to contact the appropriate finance help group. Sarah Faux, managing director of contact centre integrators Datapoint, says that IM has even found a role in second-line support for call centres. When a call comes into a helpdesk, for example, the agent could initiate a session with the appropriate team to pass the information on to the caller. The Yankee Group believes that the success of enterprise instant messaging is tied directly to the integration of presence information into applications. "The integration of presence functionality into mission-critical applications is essential," says Paul Ritter, programme manager for Internet Business Strategies at the Yankee Group. And the success of the IM vendors will depend largely on how well they can work with partners to integrate presence awareness into a variety of applications.