Instant messaging scales corporate ladder

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By Cathleen Moore

(IDG) -- Instant messaging, which has drawn millions of users into chatty, real-time communication, is ready to crack the enterprise as a tool to expedite critical work efforts by connecting employees with applications, customers, and suppliers.

According to analysts and industry observers, the new, "enterprise-strength" IM has been bolstered by the addition of critical features lacking in consumer-oriented IM services such as security, networkwide scalability, and the capability of bringing groups together to work within applications such as ERP (enterprise resource planning), CRM (customer relationship management), and MRP (material requirements planning).

"The shift away from business-worker use of consumer platforms in the workplace has begun," said Robert Mahowald, an analyst at IDC in Framingham, Mass. "There are business requirements around any collaborate app, and the consumer services can't meet the requirements for security, scalability, and application integration."

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With corporate interest growing, a host of nimble IM vendors are squaring off with large corporate collaboration players such as Lotus Development and Microsoft in a fight to win the enterprise market.

This week Washington-based Bantu will unveil a partnership with security vendor VeriSign to build digital-certificate-based IM software for enterprises. Last week Herndon, Va.-based Ikimbo announced $9.5 million in funding for its Omniprise IM enterprise platform, which puts an emphasis on security and scalability and offers one-on-one and workgroup collaboration.

Last month San Diego-based WiredRed released its e/pop 3.0 IM suite featuring application sharing, encryption, and VOIP (voice over IP) conferencing.

WiredRed's product has found a home at the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Cooley Godward law firm. With 1,600 employees in seven offices nationwide, the firm uses WiredRed's e/pop IM suite for messaging, remote training, and collaborative workflow.

"WiredRed has a remote-control feature where we can run an application across it and people can view it or use it," said Richard Ho, Cooley Godward's IS manager. "We can use it with Power Point and other apps."

Meanwhile, heavy hitters are also stepping up to the plate. Cambridge, Mass.-based Lotus Development plans to release this fall Version 2.5 of its Sametime collaboration tool, and Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft plans to ramp up IM efforts in the forthcoming release of Windows XP.

Moreover companies, including ActiveBuddy and IBM, are beefing up efforts to deliver a value-added application that rides atop IM offerings.

Although free, consumer-oriented IM services such as AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and Microsoft's MSN Messenger have gained a spot in many organizations behind the backs of their IT departments, more enterprises are deploying corporate-strength collaboration applications. (AOL Time Warner is the parent company of CNN.com.)

This week's disruption of Microsoft's MSN Messenger online consumer chat service is of concern to all enterprise IM users. But the ability to control security via server-based IM systems offers companies an attractive alternative. "You control the servers, so you control the level of security you want," said Jeremy Dies, brand manager of Sametime at Lotus.

Strategic deployment of IM and presence awareness can bring much-desired contextual collaboration to organizations, according to IDC's Mahowald.

"Contextual collaboration is where we are going with this," Mahowald said. "It is about how you can embed an IM module in a Seibel workflow application, for example. If you have IM and presence awareness embedded in the user interface, your world is looking a whole lot better. You don't have to swap between interfaces, everything syncs up, and you have a smart, archived message store."

By extending the potency of existing IM security measures such as encryption, Bantu's IM endeavor focuses on the priority that enterprises place on security.

"Security obviously is job one for any enterprise, especially for messaging," said Larry Schlang, president and CEO of Bantu. "The marriage of digital certificates, PKI [public key infrastructure], and IM creates the ability to have an industry-standard authentication mechanism play the role of authorization and facilitate encryption for IM transactions."

The update of Lotus' Sametime will focus on improving the e-meeting experience by adding the capability for saving meeting text, conducting audience polls, and automatically compiling statistics. In addition, Lotus will enhance its recently introduced Web services efforts by improving Sametime's application development capabilities so that it is easy to embed real-time components into other applications, Lotus' Dies said.

"The fact is that you won't have a stand-alone IM, but [you will be able] to embed real-time collaboration in other applications," Dies said.

The Windows Messenger feature in Windows XP will include real-time audio-and videoconferencing, application sharing, and online collaboration.

"Going forward we'll see IM and presence functionality embedded in things like e-mail, calendar, and other applications," said Dave Nelson, an analyst at Giga Information Group in Cambridge, Mass. "You'll do so much more than just chat; you'll have audio, video, whiteboarding, the ability to share presentations -- all integrated in applications."

One organization finding value in real-time collaboration is the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. The school deployed Bantu's Presence and IM Platform as an integrated element of its portal software, Citrix Systems XPS.

Many of the school's 3,500 faculty, students, researchers, and staff conduct public health research internationally, resulting in high phone bills and hard-to-reach staff. "One of the big [challenges] for us has been how to get faculty and students together when they are in different countries or different parts of the city. We've seen IM creep in on different individual workstations, but we wanted a unified approach to IM," said Ross McKenzie, the Bloomberg School's director of information systems.

Another company, Zeeland, Mich.-based furniture manufacturer Herman Miller, uses Lotus Sametime to improve the effectiveness of IT workers spread across different buildings. "It has been great to get dispersed IT groups to communicate with each other," said DuAnne Talley, manager of collaborative computing at Herman Miller. The company also integrated Sametime into its intranet that serves the company's 10,000 employees. Stitching the Sametime code into the portal allowed Herman Miller to list IT workers by specialty and availability.

Giga's Nelson said IM and presence detection "have a lot of potential for increasing collaboration and improving productivity. The challenge is to help enterprises understand how [these technologies] can be used effectively."