IM goes to work

Regardless whether anyone believes the number of instant messaging users being claimed by America Online, Yahoo and MSN, few doubt the service's enormous popularity. What's debatable is a business model that will let providers make money on a service that many have been conditioned to accept as free.

If last week's Presence and Instant Messaging conference in Boston is an indication of conventional wisdom in this market, expect to see a flood of service providers targeting the enterprise market.

Unlike the familiar, consumer-oriented applications such as AOL's IM or Yahoo's Messenger, those trying to enter the corporate market are developing secure IM platforms that take presence management a step beyond the buddy list.

“We believe instant messaging and presence isn't an application,” said Andre Durand, founder and general manager of Jabber.com, one of at least a dozen IM vendors entering the enterprise market. “We think it's a new layer of network infrastructure.”

At its most basic level, IM represents a new method of internal communications for the largest corporations. For carriers, IM is the first move into a layer of services that not only lets people communicate in real time over internal networks, but lets users control how, when, where and over what device they want to be reached.

“Once you move beyond IM, there's lots of space to operate,” said Jonathan Rosenberg, chief scientist of dynamic-soft. “If you have one service, it's stickiness. Converged applications are where you get into compelling.”

The key to many of those applications is a presence database that locates users and identifies the device they are using. Most consumer IM applications can determine whether a user is logged on but can't determine the device being used. Enterprise IM not only can tell users who is available but a little bit about their location and whether they are seated at a PC or using a mobile device.

“Presence really reflects changes in a person's context,” said Kjartan Pierre Emilsson, chief technology officer of Oz.com, noting that wireless devices that are always on may indicate presence but not the user's desire to be contacted.

“The location information in itself doesn't contain the context information. But the location information is a very useful parameter for presence,” he added.

Many carriers can track that level of presence, but most in the IM market believe those databases soon will be opened to all service providers. In fact, Durand believes carriers eventually will use IM and presence as part of larger applications.

“Presence is only a discussion at the service-provider layer and will be buried in the application,” he said. “Presence will get exposed eventually. It would be like running an ISP and not letting your customers send out an e-mail address to other ISP customers.”

Among the services that carriers could offer, for example, is the ability for enterprises to answer customer questions via IM without the use of live agents, according to Peter Levitan, CEO of Active-Buddy, which has developed an active agent that sits in the IM client.

“It gives them the ability to be autonomous in the content space,” Levitan said. “In addition to being just a chat method, IM can be a front to data.”

However, before enterprises are willing to take on IM-type services, a number of issues must be addressed, including security and scalability. Unlike their consumer counterparts, enterprise IM providers say there isn't a big push for interoperability among IM clients.

Lotus, which began shipping its Sametime collaboration software that includes IM capability in January (see figure), has a limited agreement with AOL to interoperate with its IM client but is letting its customers decide.

“You can make it as small and secure as you want or as wide and open as you want,” said Bethann Cregg, director of product marketing for Lotus' collaboration products group.