Indeed, the days when IM, which by now has entered the cultural lexicon, was largely for interoffice kibitzing or by young people to converse with friends are gone. Today IM is rapidly becoming a mainstay in corporate networks.
"If you don't have IM in this business, you're not there," says Sal Morreale, a trader at Cantor Fitzgerald. "I tend to have 10 or 11 IM windows open at a time."
And it's not just information-greedy traders who are enraptured by IM. Roughly 85 percent of all North American companies use IM, according to a recent report by market research firm Radicati Group. Some researchers even predict it will surpass e-mail as the primary way people interact electronically by the end of this year.
For companies, however, widespread use of the technology presents an important challenge: how to control and manage employee use of IM and, critically, protect against viruses and other security threats while also extending its benefits of instant communication and enterprisewide collaboration.
These advantages are spurring more and more enterprises to use IM as a standard way of conducting business. Of U.S. companies that have deployed internal IM networks, 44 percent did so to boost intraoffice communications, Radicati found. But the potential cost savings also are compelling--33 percent said they offer IM to their employees to reduce long-distance phone charges.
To archive and secure their IM systems, hundreds of the world's biggest financial institutions and other companies turn to three small start-ups: Akonix Systems of San Diego, FaceTime Communications of Foster City, Calif., and IMlogic of Waltham, Mass.
For now, most businesses use the big public IM networks--America Online's Instant Messenger, or AIM; Yahoo's Messenger; and Microsoft's MSN Messenger--to deliver messaging services. Meanwhile, segments of the financial community have gravitated toward particular networks.
Most equity traders, for example, use AIM, while commodity traders tend to rely on Yahoo Messenger to communicate outside their firms. Most banks and other companies also might have internal enterprise IM solutions, including Microsoft's Live Communications Server or IBM's Lotus Sametime, which are used for employee-to-employee communications.
Also popular are hosted services offered by Bloomberg and Reuters Group, both of which run their own IM networks. "Nearly all companies will use multiple IM networks," says Francis deSouza, founder and chief executive of IMlogic. "It is still a heterogeneous network environment, so we have to support all 13 networks."
Many companies don't even know what kind of IM traffic travels among their employees, deSouza says, so IMlogic offers a free download that detects how many public IM network users a company has. "Often a company will tell us that they don't have instant messaging at their company," he says. "A lot of IT departments get a big eye-opener."
Part of the reason for this confusion is that unlike e-mail, IM usage is driven from the bottom up by workers, not down from corporate networks. "E-mail is a rollout planned and managed by IT departments, but IM has come in through the employees," deSouza says. "So IT and compliance departments have been playing catch-up."
IM hits the financial district
The flexibility of the three providers' products enhances their appeal. In some cases, that can spell the difference between a customer's opting to buy a piece of IM software rather than writing its own application.
That was the case when information giant Thomson Financial in February struck a deal with AOL and IMlogic that augments Thomson's AutEx service, an online network that enables equity traders to exchange "indications of interest," or IOIs. With the new
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- a 4th company
- by July 4, 2005 11:01 PM PDT
- smarsh.com is another company in this space.
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