IM generation Is changing the way business talks

NY TIMES: Instant messaging has come of age. No longer the province of chatty teenagers, it is now part and parcel of advanced communications networks at many corporations. And as instant messaging takes hold, companies are benefiting from new productivity gains and improvements in customer response time.

“I almost never get email from my Sun colleagues,” said Tim Bray, an avid instant messager and director of Web technologies for Sun Microsystems. “And I only get voice mails from outsiders.”

Sun isn’t the only technology company to embrace instant messaging. “We send 2.5 million IM’s within I.B.M. each day,” says David Marshak, senior product manager for collaboration at I.B.M. “And we have virtually zero voice mails here.”

A sign of instant messaging’s growing corporate rise came earlier this year when I.B.M. said it would open its Lotus Sametime product, a messaging platform currently used by more than 15 million workers at thousands of companies, to other messaging systems.

Years ago, when PC’s were spreading through corporations, many companies eliminated secretaries on the theory that the machines would enable professionals to do their own typing and send their own messages by email. But phishing attacks, viruses and spam have clogged email networks, and voicemail boxes are also overflowing.

Now a generation of office workers who grew up with instant messaging has gained control. They have made IM the new black, the latest trend in information technology. Along the way, they have changed how the corporate world converses and have built a series of new communication applications.

“With IM, I know that someone is available, so I can take rapid action to support more real-time operations,” said Ashley Roach, a server product manager at Jabber Inc., which sells open-source instant messaging server software.

Instant messaging is becoming an important ingredient for corporations that want to respond rapidly to demands from inside and outside. They are using it to tie customers closer together and to enable workers to communicate across the globe.

One example is IntelliCare Inc., based in Portland, Me., which operates call centers for health care providers. Everyone in the company uses Lotus Sametime.

“One of our nurses answers the phone when you call your doctor in the middle of the night, and 97 percent of our nurses work from home,” said Jeff Forbes, chief information officer. “The nurse can fire off an IM to an expert and get a response back without having to interrupt your call.”

Its IM-based model has allowed IntelliCare to hire staff members without worrying about where they are based, and to train them using chat sessions that provide instant feedback. “Using these tools is like raising your hand in class and asking for help, except you are working from home,” Mr. Forbes said.

Banks, insurance companies and other old-school businesses are using instant messaging to communicate with customers and quickly route queries, all within seconds. In the not-so-distant past, email was considered state of the art, and responding within 24 hours was considered prompt. Those days seem quaint now; instant messaging is used in more than 80 percent of corporations, according to a report by Michael Osterman, an industry analyst.

“Every energy company in North America is on IM; it is such a convenient way to distribute information,” said Tim Gunn, the chief executive of NetEnergy, an energy brokerage in Calgary, Alberta, who brokers trades between customers using instant messaging.

Among the most important factors behind IM’s quick conquest of the business world is geography. Within many companies today, workers are spread across the globe and are much more mobile. Finding someone often requires more than just making a phone call or sending an email message. With instant messaging, a correspondent knows who is available, and who is not, at any moment.

“If you want to talk to someone informally, using IM is like sticking your head over the top of the cubicle,” said Mr. Bray of Sun Microsystems. “You can also make your cubicle walls infinitely high if you don’t want to talk to anyone.”

Many managers say that IM can improve collaboration and foster a sense of community, especially among widely scattered workers.

“With IM, you can educate an entire team, give them feedback in real time, develop relationships and cement the team together,” Mr. Forbes said. “Otherwise, people working at home will feel isolated.”

The group-chat mechanisms of IM also make it easier to have multiple conversations going, and one-to-many conversations.

“It is hard to be on the phone with 30 different guys at the same time,” said Brian Trudeau, chief information officer for Amerex Energy in Sugar Land, Tex. “Being a brokerage house, you want to be in contact with as many of your customers as you can, and all at once.” At Amerex, he said, the IM system is more mission-critical than the phone system.

Finally, email is woefully inadequate for guaranteed message delivery, and clumsy when it comes to conducting business in real time.

Nevertheless, business use of instant messaging has some unresolved problems. There is the question of interoperability among the four largest IM vendors: America Online, Microsoft, eBay/Skype and Yahoo. Each is independent, and users of one cannot communicate easily with users on others.

Information technology staffs are rightly concerned about viruses in instant messages. Several vendors, including Akonix, IMlogic (recently bought by Symantec) and FaceTime Communications, have offered countermeasures.

None of these issues is insurmountable, however, and IM is most likely to continue making inroads in corporate communications. America Online is offering a software developer’s kit that allows third parties to create their own branded IM clients and applications, running over the AOL IM network. These could take the form of a button on a corporate Web site, for example. The move is important because before, AOL was loath to open its network for independent software developers.

The spread of IM can make it an ever more sophisticated corporate tool. Other trends also play a role.

First, instant messaging is becoming a focus of the open-source movement. Much of that activity is being encouraged by the Jabber Software Foundation, an organization that manages development of open-source messaging protocols and was founded by software developers devoted to instant messaging.

There are now several dozen instant messaging products, including Google Talk and the latest version of Apple’s iChat, both of which work with other Jabber clients. “What Jabber has pioneered is the ability for interoperability, so you can use IM like your email system,” Mr. Roach said.

As a result of the Jabber efforts, the commercial systems from Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo are starting to feel pressure to open up, enabling more users to communicate across systems.

I.B.M. announced this year that its Sametime IM product would widen its support beyond AOL IM and include other networks, too. Google and AOL are working to make their systems operate together. And there is even talk about Microsoft’s opening its IM doors.

Third, the newest instant messaging software combines voice and video with text messages, making it a more powerful replacement for the telephone. (It is already much cheaper, especially for international calls.)

Skype, which was acquired by eBay last year, mostly on the strength of its fast-growing user base, charges pennies per minute to make voice-over-Internet calls to any place in the world, and offers free voice calling between users of the software. Voice and video calling is now part of instant messaging software from Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple and AOL.

Finally, increasing numbers of major corporations are deploying their own large-scale internal instant-messaging networks, pushing IM further into the mainstream.

These corporations are building new applications on top of instant messaging, taking advantage of the fact that private IM networks are insulated from the outside world. The process is reminiscent of when corporate intranets were first built, in the mid-1990’s. These private areas on the Web were created as applications on top of the Web protocols.

All of which means the end could be near for business voice mail, as more and more companies adopt instant messaging.

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