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By Futurity Media, 21 February 2006 14:34

COMMENT

Mobile IM is about to hit the big time. But is it really that great a tool for businesses? Futurity Media's Stewart Baines is sceptical.

Mobile instant messaging has so far been a slow burner but a coalition of operators formed in Barcelona at the annual 3GSM Congress hopes to change that. Fifteen key international operators, including Orange, Telefonica, T-Mobile and Vodafone, joined with the GSM Association in announcing a programme dubbed 'personal IM' to interconnect their mobile instant messaging platforms. In doing so, they hope to extend IM's potential far beyond that seen in the PC realm.

Of the one billion registered IM accounts, already 300 million people claim to be regular IM users on PCs. This is not an inconsiderable amount: Strategy Analytics estimates they generate more than 12 billion instant messages per day. Studies show that on average, an IM user will participate in sessions lasting 20 minutes and generate 100 messages. For the public IM networks - AOL, MSN, Yahoo! - this generates huge volumes of traffic but very little direct revenue.

The intention in offering mobile IM is not to undermine SMS revenues but to add to them with a more invidious and addictive form of communications. Imagine if the language and lexicon of PC instant messaging spreads to the mobile.

The mobile community believes it can turn the idea that IM is free on its head and in so doing unearth a vast treasure trove.

The proposed payment system for the 'personal IM' scheme will be to charge the sending party, with charges similar to SMS. If the 12 billion instant messages sent every day from PCs to PCs can be doubled by the addition of mobile instant messages, this will deliver more than a billion pounds of new revenues every day to mobile operators. And the Arpu of IM addicts will be considerable: in a 20-minute session, 50 messages sent from a mobile device will generate up to £5.00 in operator revenue.

Great news for operators who have struggled to sell content-rich multimedia services. My chief concern, though, is who will be footing the bill?

Like PC versions, mobile instant messaging has so far been stifled by lack of interoperability. Users have needed to either download mobile clients of the existing public IM systems, like MSN Messenger, or use proprietary, operator-controlled IM systems. Given that mobile operators' have agreed to allow their proprietary IM platforms to interoperate, and have openly invited the public IM networks to join the fray, Strategy Analytics predicts that the 12 million mobile IM users of today will be 189 million by 2009.

Although it's hard to put a figure on just how many of these will be using a company phone to send messages, it is undeniable the some businesses will be footing the bill for employees' IM conversations. Already many IT directors recognise that although some IM use can be shown to be business-orientated, the vast majority is idle chit-chat, some of which is inane, some offensive.

The biggest cost so far has been employee productivity. With mobile operators proposing to charge for all outbound mobile instant messages, it will not only be productivity that is threatened - monthly phone bills will also soar. IM is abused in the office, and it is hard to believe it won't be when workers are out of the office.

The personal IM scheme will not charge users for receiving messages, and so there will be little barrier for PC-to-mobile messaging. Users cannot tell who is mobile and who is not, so probably conversations between a PC and a mobile client will generate the same number of messages as a PC-to-PC session.

Even if mobile-to-mobile, or mobile-to-PC, IM sessions are shorter and generate less traffic than PC-to-PC instant messaging sessions, other challenges will emerge for the corporate bill payer.

So far, operators have presented an open invitation to the three main public IM networks to join in. But if the rising tide of unsolicited marketing and viruses continue to impact the PC-based IM, they may regret being so open.

Spim - spam over instant messaging - is becoming problematic. Two years ago, Yankee Group estimated that it accounted for five to eight per cent of corporate IM. It is anyone's guess just how much that has increased since. It has proliferated because the cost of sending a message to multiple users is disproportionate to the cost of sending to one user. Considering that it will be free to receive instant messages on mobile devices, it's hard to see the spim problem not spreading out of the office.

A similar threat exists with viruses. According to messaging management companies, security threats propagating via IM networks, increased by 1,000 to 2,000 per cent over the last year. Yet only around 10 per cent of businesses have antivirus systems which protect IM, while most have AV for email. Spim and viruses conveyed by IMs are not as threatening as those carried by email. But what will be the effect of adding hundreds of millions more nodes, as would happen through mobile instant messaging?

The bottom line for businesses is that while SMS volumes may decrease slightly, new mobile instant messages will skyrocket, employees will waste more time and viruses will invade from all directions. Forgive me if I'm not excited by the prospect of mobile IM.

The phenomenon will have some genuine business benefits. The inherent presence capabilities will be useful as long as the user has signed in. Group conferencing using IM will now be extended to those not sitting at a PC or laptop. And messages are guaranteed delivered in real-time.

These may be useful qualities but I can see little else about mobile instant messaging that can repay businesses what it costs to offer it.

Stewart Baines is a freelance journalist and director at Futurity Media.