Voice Plus - Instant Gratification

'CHAT' Finds a Home in the Corporate World

"People were skeptical. They thought it was for teenagers," says Sam Fahmy, CEO of Bungo Inc. (www.bungo.com), a provider of Internet-enabled communications and collaboration solutions that includes IM. "It's interesting how the pendulum has swung. Businesses are now seeing a need for more collaborative messaging."

But the entry of IM into the corporate world was more of a guerrilla tactic by employees rather than an enlightened vision of the corporate IT staff.

"A lot of companies have been slow to accept instant messaging," says Darrin Wood, product manager for IM solutions at Novell Inc. (www.novell.com). "Their philosophy is that they provide employees with e-mail, phones and cell phones. ... Why should they implement IM if there are other ways to communicate? But there's such a big underground group using consumer programs [such as AOL Instant Message, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!], that [IT managers] have become worried about the security issue."

The guerrilla tactic of employees loading AOL's IM or Yahoo!'s product onto the office computer and potentially sharing sensitive corporate tidbits over an unsecure public channel brought IT departments to their senses.

Since employees were going to use an instant communications program, IT managers needed something that would interoperate with firewalls, allow secure communications, and be easy to use as well as portable, meaning that users could sign on and access from any device, anywhere.

As a result, computing giants such as Lotus Development Corp. (www.lotus.com), Microsoft Corp. (www.microsoft.com) and Novell, as well as smaller upstarts such as Bantu Inc. (www.bantu.com), Bungo, Firetalk Communications Inc. (www.firetalk.com), HotVoice Communications International Inc. (www.hotvoice.com) and Parlano Inc. (www.parlano.com), are taking a shot at developing IM offerings that can be used independently or as part of a larger Internet collaboration and communications platform.

With more of a focus on the business market by these vendors, corporate IM growth is expected to soar. Interoperability standards, which will enable users of one system to talk to users of another, are expected to be completed early this year, further fueling the growth of business IM.

This year, the corporate space will have about 5.5 million users sending 137 million messages a day, compared to more than 177 million consumer IM users tapping out almost 790 million messages each day, says Robert Mahowald, senior research analyst for the Collaborative Computing program at IDC (www.idc.com). However, IDC predicts that by 2004 there will be more than 181 million corporate users sending 4.4 billion instant messages a day (see "Worldwide Instant Messaging Users" below, and "Number of Instant Messages Sent Each Day".

With greater demand for instantaneous communication, deploying IM systems may be a positive event for IT departments. Rather than being another complicated platform to manage, IM systems typically are easy to maintain and can improve a staff's productivity, and the quick questions that can be asked using IM can take some stress off of the e-mail system.

Chart:Worldwide Instant Messaging Users

"Instant messaging will be the third pillar of communications, besides e-mail and the web," says David Schonberg, vice president of research and development for Parlano, a company that got its start within the IT department of UBS Warburg (www.ubswarburg.com). Since it was spun off less than a year ago, Parlano now provides IM services to financial firms such as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. (www.cme.com).

As Schonberg believes, IM in the corporate setting is much more than just the instant gratification of communications needs. It's part of a broader move toward "presence" functionality, which enables users to know if the person they need to contact is online and immediately available--whether it's for phone calls, quick questions via IM or even spur-of-the-moment conference calls.

"IM, for the most part, is misunderstood by the public at large," says Aymar de Lencquesaing, CEO of HotVoice, an international provider of integrated IP telephony, unified messaging and IM. "From the technical standpoint, it's enabling the notion of presence. It changes how we've done communications for the last 100 years."

He says that presence is fundamentally changing how people view the tools, from a personal and professional standpoint.

"The essence of instant messaging is the presence information and availability," says Sridhar Ramanathan, vice president of product management and product marketing for Firetalk, a provider of integrated communications solutions, with an emphasis on Internet-based voice services. "Presence isn't controlled by the user, but availability is. All of that is wrapped into collaboration and web conferencing."

Ramanathan and other industry executives believe IM will play a key role in advancing web-based collaboration tools.

"It'll be part of a full-fledged collaboration, with sharing files, videoconference feeds and documents," Wood says. "Companies will say, 'If we can save money on travel, it'll be a bigger value than saying we're saving some money on the phone bill.'"

But, says de Lencquesaing, web collaboration tools and IM will never eliminate face-to-face meetings. Rather, they will give users more freedom and flexibility.

Chart:Number of Instant Messages Sent Each Day

For instance, de Lencquesaing says, he can be on the road, checking his e-mail and surfing the web while responding to questions from his employees via IM. Or two or more people can be browsing the web or looking at the same document while critiquing and asking questions using instant messaging.

The presence and availability functions of IM will also play an important role in the future evolution of unified communications. HotVoice, for instance, has rolled IM, VoIP and unified messaging, which encompasses voice mail, e-mail and fax, into its overall offering.

"What unified communications does is allow you to tie different call routing to different status," de Lencquesaing says. "You can choose when and where to receive calls. When you make outbound calls, you have [a] presence engine to let you know if a person is online that you want to call."

Adding Value

To be viable, many believe IM solutions must share three common attributes:

* They must be platform independent, meaning the solutions are web-based, with no client software to download onto individual devices;

* They must have the predictability of e-mail. For mission critical usage, business users want to be able to write and send messages anytime; and

* They must allow users to archive and follow the message streams over time.

"Being web based--that was No.1 for us," says Larry Schlang, president and CEO of Bantu. "If you're web-based, then the application is device independent." Bantu's offering works on any platform, he notes, including Windows, WAP and Linux.

Bantu's web-based system was precisely what Sprint Corp. (www.sprint.com) was looking for when it went in search of an IM provider.

"It meets the requirements for business," says Rob Slusher, Sprint's market development manager for e-business applications. He says Bantu's solution is firewall friendly, is accessed from the web so there's no software to manage on individual computers, uses proprietary encryption to ensure security, and is interoperable with other IM programs except for AOL, which blocks Bantu users.

Slusher says Sprint's IM offering, which debuted in late October, is strictly a value-add and not something the company expects to turn a profit on.

"Looking for ways to make money on it is not a primary concern," he adds. "It rounds out what we're trying to offer on the Internet Collaboration Center site. It makes data conferencing that much more rich ... and if you do an audio or video conference, it's a great way to get simple questions answered."

There is no charge to use Sprint's IM service.

As for the ability to write messages at any time and archive replies for future reference, several companies have developed solutions to assist users who don't want to stay online constantly because they fear they'll miss important information.

Bungo and Parlano offer users the ability to archive IM conversations, so interested parties can go back and catch up on discussions they have missed. Parlano even allows users to subscribe to specific channels--not unlike newsgroups dedicated to a particular topic.

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