Analyst says IM will become the de facto tool for voice, video and text chat.
Once dismissed by many as a mere “chat” tool with no real business value, instant messaging (IM) has become a classic example of a “bottom-up” technology — one that has spread throughout enterprise environments largely because individual users have installed IM clients on their business computers after finding it useful at home.
Today, IM has become a vital business communication tool on par with the telephone or e-mail. Organizations that haven’t already incorporated IM into their critical business processes should begin doing so immediately, according to technology research and advisory firm Gartner.
In fact, Gartner predicts that IM systems will increasingly displace existing forms of communication and collaboration to become the de facto tool for voice, video and text chat. Gartner expects 95 percent of workers in leading global organizations to be using IM as their primary interface for real-time communications by 2013. The worldwide market for enterprise IM is forecast to grow from $267 million in 2005 to $688 million in 2010.
“The business benefits that IM can bring are considerable,” said David Mario Smith, research analyst at Gartner. “The ability to connect people in disparate locations by text, voice and video in one application is incredibly powerful and is equally well suited to an informal ‘water cooler’ atmosphere as well as more formal group communications.”
Spreading the Word
Smith said that IM is increasingly being used as a vehicle for rapidly disseminating critical information to the entire enterprise, groups of users or individuals in cases such as natural catastrophes, health issues, network outages or schedule changes. In some cases, the IM network remains operational when phone or e-mail systems are down. He highlighted IM’s growing importance to customer relations departments and call centers where IM is being used to foster closer relationships by providing faster and easier access to the most relevant part of the organization.
Although IM is displacing existing communications channels such as e-mail, Smith says it is unlikely to actually replace e-mail in the enterprise outright.
“Rather than replacing e-mail, IM will augment and complement the use of e-mail,” he said. “E-mail is an excellent and unique tool that has, in recent years, been misused and above all overused. It was never intended for real-time, snappy communications but for the conveyance of more detailed, less transitory content. IM excels at real-time communication and this why it sits so happily alongside e-mail at the core of the communications and collaboration architecture of the future.”
Archiving Questions
Where e-mail still has an advantage over IM is in archiving. At present, vendors such as IBM and Microsoft allow server-side archiving of IM records for compliance. However, the issue is that users can save their text chat information at the client side and this could be tampered with. Until this issue is effectively resolved it could lead to huge legal headaches. Crucial to the future success of enterprise IM therefore will be determining how to effectively capture IM records and how to develop a concrete IM policy. Most organizations have developed similar policies for e-mail on both of these issues in recent years.
E-mail and IM are so closely allied in the minds of many enterprises that Gartner foresees that the vast majority will choose IM systems that complement their e-mail systems. According to Smith, this is leading to tremendous consolidation in the marketplace.
“Standalone enterprise vendors face increasing pressure from strategic platform vendors like IBM and Microsoft, which are positioned to leverage their e-mail and collaboration infrastructures to dominate the enterprise IM market,” he said. “What we are now seeing from these players is the morphing of the IM system into more than it was originally intended for — that is, a fully converged unified communications platform with presence at its center.”
Presence Integration
Presence technology allows people to establish the availability of others for real-time communications regardless of their location. It also enables users to cut through desktop clutter, resulting in immediate responses. This has proved invaluable in time-sensitive business processes such as customer service, regulatory issues, crisis management and problem resolution.
“What makes IM work has always been presence technology, and business users are beginning to see the benefit of using presence across multiple applications,” said Smith. “To date, the options for integrating presence with other applications have been limited. What organizations need is a real-time collaboration architecture, which makes presence information available beyond the confines of an IM application.”
As a result, Gartner predicts that by 2012, presence technology will be offered independently of IM and e-mail products. Smith urged vendors and enterprises alike to recognize this and develop a real-time architecture with presence as the key ingredient.
“The IM client is becoming the launch pad for many types of communications channels and services,” he said. “Presence will extend its influence beyond IM to become an essential source of innovation for enterprise applications of the future.”
Back to Menu
Back to Archive
