We are just wrapping up our twice-yearly tracking survey of instant messaging in the workplace. The results are not particularly stunning, but they reflect the maturation of the IM market and its continued growth.

Here are some of the results from the research:

* Twenty-six percent of e-mail users in the workplace use IM on a regular basis while at work, up slightly from 24% as we found in the March survey. This figure continues to creep up consistently as new users realize the benefits of using IM in the workplace.

* Fifty-two percent of organizations are using IM for real-world business applications, identical to what we found in our last survey. While this figure is impressive given that consumer IM clients dominate the use of IM in the workplace, we expect this figure to climb significantly as organizations roll out their own enterprise-grade IM systems and/or provide enterprise features to the current base of IM clients, instead of relying solely on the viral nature of IM to expand its use.

* Two-thirds of organizations are concerned or very concerned about the potential for viruses, worms and other threats to enter their networks through IM. This is the highest percentage of respondents that are this concerned since we added this question to the tracking survey last year. I suspect that this concern is due, in large part, to the well-publicized nature of the growing number of IM threats that have affected IM systems - the number of IM threats so far in 2005 is dramatically higher than for all of 2004.

* The three leading consumer IM clients - AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger - continue to be the three leading workplace IM clients. Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing (Sametime) continues as the leading enterprise IM system in use, although Microsoft Live Communication Server continues to increase its penetration. Surprisingly, Google Talk is already present in a significant percentage of the organizations we surveyed, despite the fact that it was introduced only recently.

Highlights of the tracking survey are available here.

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.