Biz users prep for IM onslaught

As consumer instant-messaging tools  take root in corporate America, network executives are scrambling to deploy gateways to control their usage while also exploring more long-term strategies.

Vendors have responded to the need this past month as Yahoo, AOL and last week Microsoft's MSN all introduced gateways for corporate networks that address the shortcomings of consumer instant-messaging services by providing customer-based security, logging, auditing and user management controls (See stories on AOL and MSN ).

The immediate message is that network executives can no longer merely block grass-roots adoption of free instant-messaging clients or let them run wild on their networks. And for the long term it signals that corporations need infrastructures to support instant messaging, which experts say is showing it can foster productivity, especially when integrated with corporate applications.

Business use of IM increasing

Business use of instant messaging is expected to rise from 65.5 million users today to 260 million by 2006, according to IDC. The percentage of those using it for business is expected to rise from fewer than 40% today to nearly 90% by 2006.

Many companies are just starting to address instant messaging by learning about what is running on their networks today.

"We created quite an uproar in June when our [regulatory] compliance department discovered [instant messaging] and said we had to ban its use," says Lee Blackmore, director of IT for Stifel Nicolaus, a brokerage firm in St. Louis.

Blackmore says a group of institutional brokers lobbied to keep their AOL Instant Messenger clients, which they had deployed without permission. He was forced to quickly deploy a management system, so he installed a gateway from IMLogic that provides user management and logs everything in the company's archiving system.

"Now we are sitting back and waiting to see how the industry moves forward and how the standards mature before we develop a corporate strategy on [instant messaging]," he says. "We are interested in reliability and control and positioning ourselves for future growth."

Blackmore says he is looking at IBM/Lotus Sametime, the forthcoming Greenwich instant-messaging server from Microsoft, a private financial services instant-messaging network from Reuters and the possibility of keeping his gateway.

Control IM outbreaks

Experts say Stifel Nicolaus is typical of companies that control outbreaks of instant messaging with hybrid systems combining consumer networks and corporate-controlled gateways. But corporate adoption is likely to turn on enterprise-grade systems and not retrofitted consumer services.

Those corporate systems will be based on the Internet Engineering Task Force's recently minted Session Initiation Protocol for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE ), which promises to create an environment comparable to e-mail and its Simple Mail Transfer Protocol in terms of interoperability.

SIMPLE also erodes the model used so deftly by AOL to build a customer base of 180 million, mainly that users can only send instant messages to other AOL users. With standards, companies along with their customers and business partners won't have to use the same platform or service.