That “ping” you just heard could have been your colleague receiving an instant message from a client or business partner. But probably not.
Instant messaging, a form of e-mail that allows users to exchange short “real time” messages, has become the fastest-growing form of communication in the United States – and a conundrum for employers.
Many companies are becoming increasingly concerned that workers are chatting away with friends and family online. The trend also is vexing for information-technology officers, who are confronted with the swelling amount of instant-messaging traffic on the network.
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“IT managers are becoming very wary of instant messaging,” said Cliff Raskind, director of the global wireless practice at Strategy Analytics Inc., a Boston-based research firm. “They generally view it as a rogue application, and they’re starting to take steps to put instant messaging behind the firewall.”
The problem will only grow. By 2009, Strategy Analytics projects that instant messaging will surpass e-mail as the dominant mode of written electronic communication.
But there is a flip side. Many businesses are taking relatively inexpensive steps to harness the use of instant messaging as a convenient way to talk with customers and business partners, instead of trying to banish online chatting altogether.
There now are between 12 million and 25 million corporate users of instant-messaging systems in the country, according to FaceTime Communications, a California-based provider of instant-messaging services for businesses.
“The natural reaction for many businesses is that they want to block instant messaging systems,” said Meachdi Maghsoodnia, chief technology officer at FaceTime.
That, however, was the same reaction many managers had six or seven years ago to the emergence of the World Wide Web – a tool most employees now use daily for legitimate business-related tasks. Maghsoodnia said the same thing is happening with instant messaging.
“More and more companies are realizing that communicating with (people) in real time is of value to them,” Maghsoodnia said. “What they need is to apply a layer of management and control to these networks.”
Industries in which fast and frequent communication with clients is key – services companies such as law firms, marketing agencies and financial-services firms – are the most likely sectors to implement corporate use of instant messaging.
Traders of bonds, stocks and commodities, for example, use instant messaging to communicate with buyers and sellers, Maghsoodnia said.
FaceTime markets an application specifically for financial firms, which resides behind a company’s firewall, allowing brokers to communicate securely with clients.
Raskind said Strategy Analytics slashed long-distance phone costs by some 70 percent when researchers at the firm – which has a number of overseas offices – started using instant messaging to converse.
Small- and mid-sized businesses, Maghsoodnia said, can put a server on its network that will track the flow of employees’ instant messaging use on public services such AOL and Yahoo. That oversight offers just what many IT managers are looking for when it comes to instant messaging: control. They would be able to see who’s using the system and control file transfers – something that has become increasingly common over instant-messaging systems.
Larger companies that see the opportunity to use instant messaging as a viable communications tool should consider implementing their own enterprise system, Maghsoodnia said.
What’s more, blocking the use of instant-messaging systems can be tricky, said Christopher Poe, an applications engineer at Atrion Networking, a Warwick-based network services provider. Poe said he recently visited a client in Buffalo who wanted to block Yahoo instant messaging.
“These applications have gotten smart enough to say ‘hey, I’m not getting out on this port, let me just hop to another one,’” Poe said.
But for now – at least for most businesses – instant messaging remains more of a menace than anything.
“I haven’t bumped into any client that values instant messaging as an official communications medium,” Poe said.
Curtis Juaire, chief technology officer at Automate Inc. in Providence, a system integration company, agrees.
“From the casual observations I’ve made at clients’ offices, it’s all personal use,” Juaire said.
“Businesses already are inundated by e-mail. It’s just one more thing for
(IT managers) to deal with.”
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