Instant messaging slipped quietly into the workplace at Lehman Brothers last autumn.
After terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center on 11 September, the Wall Street brokerage turned a blind eye when employees took up AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) to stay in touch with co-workers and family. The crisis left the company's employees scattered across the city, and the program's simple "buddy lists"--which show when others are online and available to chat--proved too powerful and comforting to shut down.
These days, however, Lehman is questioning how much longer the service should stay. At stake is not so much the future of instant messaging at Lehman, but rather America Online's role as a provider of it.
Companies "want security, they want archiving, they want control over who's in and out of community, and they want the ability to set rules of community," asserts Gary Reifman, product manager at Communicator, a little-known IM provider being courted by at least eight Wall Street firms, including Lehman.
Corporations aren't the only ones confronting the dilemma of instant messaging in the workplace. IM giants including AOL, the world's largest, are facing a difficult balancing act as they try to turn technology first developed for consumers into a paid service for businesses.
AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo! have attracted millions of people with free IM services, which allow them to swap text messages and files in real time to other IM buddies. Now all three are struggling to offer corporate applications that won't leave behind the teeming masses.
At stake are a host of potential business uses for instant messaging that can reach beyond closed corporate walls--from customer service to instant purchasing and marketing. But these efforts to court both sides of the corporate firewall are falling flat and could delay acceptance of the biggest IM providers in corporations, which are gravitating toward closed messaging networks.
The trend could make it more difficult for the IM leaders to use their vast customer rolls as bargaining chips as they step into the race to create paid services.
According to a poll released earlier this year by Osterman Research, a third of companies surveyed were "neutral" about adding instant messaging into their networks, while 23 percent blocked IM communication outright.
"We found that a lot of organisations simply block instant messaging traffic, primarily for security reasons," said Michael Osterman, president and founder of Osterman Research. "They don't have bandwidth to deploy truly secure IM now, so instead they're just going to block them."
Having it both ways
Many companies have recognised that instant messaging is an important tool for communicating with other employees or clients. But companies, especially in the financial world, aren't so happy about using popular consumer IM services that let their employees chat with the rest of the unruly Internet.
That perception will be one of the major hurdles in the ambitions of the Big Three messaging providers, which are in various stages of packaging IM services to sell to large corporations. It's an area they all want to dominate, since they could charge companies to use services that have always been free on the Net.
But corporate network administrators, fearful of the lack of security in IM software, are not sold on the idea of opening their networks to public instant messengers.
Although the number of IM viruses floating around the Internet is minuscule compared with the number of e-mail viruses, companies don't want to take any chances. Network administrators can envision the day when someone may develop a malicious virus that could be injected into a corporate network through a hole pierced open by a messaging client.
"I think it's a problem waiting to happen," Osterman said. AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo!--the owners of the biggest IM services--want it both ways. They will offer security and encrypted internal chats but remain steadfast in their belief that communication with the rest of their IM users is essential.
The leaders have been unquestionably successful in luring Internet users onto their services. Instant messaging has become one of the most popular applications on the Internet and has been described as a communications system rivaling the telephone.
The only problem is how to make money off it. AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo! have millions upon millions of IM users, many of whom use several services simultaneously, since none of them can talk to each other. Some services flash small advertising banners, while others, such as Yahoo! Messenger, allow people to download custom backgrounds created by partners. Yet forcing people to pay for instant messaging is considered market suicide, akin to forcing people to pay for sending email.
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ITconex is ALREADY ready for business.
6 months ago we began work on an Instant Messaging network which is designed specifically for business use, the result can be found at www.itconex.com.
We've addressed all of the security issues which MSN, AOL and others suffer from for a corporate perspective. Features, security and integration for the network coming out the whazoo.