Instant messaging gains corporate respect

In the corporate fight to stem the invasion of consumer instant messaging, network executives are finding ways to turn what has been a negative into a productive enterprise tool.

What is developing in many large companies is a hybrid approach to deploying instant messaging for use over corporate firewalls. In essence, network executives are taking advantage of the cost-free consumer instant-messaging infrastructure, which they never have to service or upgrade, and adding a set of their own administrative tools they manage centrally.

Therefore, many are giving up the fight to block consumer instant-messaging services and are instead deploying software that provides tools for logging, auditing, archiving, policy enforcement, usage tracking and user identification for consumer clients such as AOL, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo.

"You either block all this stuff, force users on to one client that you control or find something that gives you a level of comfort in allowing these services in the company," says Stephen Webster, IS director of infrastructure, engineering and product operations for Calpine, an independent power producer in San Jose. "The latter is the tack we took because the other two are a real hassle. We don't have the manpower to shut down all these IM services or deploy a single client we have to maintain."

Webster, like most network executives, sees consumer instant-messaging products invading his network. He says the company's energy traders can't compete without the application.

IDC reports that 35% of users of consumer instant-messaging services are business customers and that 70% of companies have workers using instant-messaging for business-related activities.

"We thought businesses would buy corporate IM products to replace consumer instant messaging for client-facing lines of business, but that hasn't happened because of problems with interoperability and robust business clients," says Robert Mahowald, an analyst with IDC. "What's developed is a hybrid market. It's plopping these gateways down so business workers can use these consumer IM clients."

Mahowald says these gateways or "IM utilities" are slick enablers as opposed to enterprise instant-message software such as Lotus Sametime or Microsoft Exchange or hosted services. "The size of the consumer IM space and the lack of IM standards has businesses saying if we can't form a coherent IM strategy than this is the way to go," Mahowald says.

One drawback, however, is that corporations that use consumer instant-messaging networks for business have no control over availability and reliability, which has not been a problem.But Calpine's Webster says he doesn't want to invest in an instant-messaging infrastructure because there are no standards to tie different platforms together. It's the same issue e-mail faced nearly a decade ago when companies required bulky gateways to exchange messages between disparate e-mail programs.

"When there are standards, I will think about bringing IM in-house," Webster says.

Instead of fighting his users, Webster became proactive. He rolled out a software product called IM-Age for Desktops from IM-Age Software that installs on his desktops and gives him administrative control over instant-messaging clients from all the consumer providers.

He says the software installs via a logon script and runs in stealth mode so his users can't turn it off. He is able to add disclaimers, archive messages and flag keywords contained in instant messages.

IM-Age for Desktops, which was released two weeks ago, does all its work from the desktop, encrypting and decrypting messages before they go out on the network. It also can send instant messages to a database for logging and reporting.

The company plans to add user administrative tools in a future release to link names in a company directory to instant-messaging nicknames. The software is priced at $4,000 for 100 seats and $3,000 for the database storage software.

IM-Age competes with companies such as IM-Logic, FaceTime Communications and Akonix, which provide proxies or gateways that sit behind a corporate firewall.

"It is no longer viable for IT to tell users to stop using consumer IM products," says Francis deSouza, CEO of IM-Logic. "You take this away from brokers and salespeople and they say they are at a disadvantage."

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