Probably never, here’s why.
What was once the realm of teenage girls chatting with each other, instant messaging has taken over the corporate network like a wildfire, introduced not by the IT manager, but by the employees themselves, to keep in touch with their kids, friends, and close business contacts (usually in that order). Because there is no interoperability in sight for AOL, MSN, and Yahoo, employees typically run all three clients to be able to communicate with contacts that are spread out across these networks.
AOL, MSN and Yahoo want you to pay from $24 to $30 per seat, per year, to have some additional features added to the clients. These features are geared to solving problems of employees using these clients to talk to customers. The problem is that customers are distributed across all three networks, making this a very expensive proposition.
So who uses instant messaging to talk to clients anyway? Today it’s mostly brokers in the financial services industry that have a few “special” clients that must have real time access to their brokers. I suspect if I was trading thousands of dollars of stocks daily, I too may want to have real time access to my broker, but that is only one market.
So who else? Well, there’s the problem. As customers, we are a finicky bunch. We want instant responses, but are unwilling to have our online status published to every company so that they can contact us later at their whim. We want immediate access to customer service, but immediate access means that companies must stock up on customer service reps, a very expensive proposition, raising the price of products and services.
Companies have long had the ability to implement instant messaging for customer service and sales, through companies like LivePerson, HelloHelp, and Groopz. In fact, these solutions are all based on standards, allowing anyone with a browser to communicate with the reps, requiring no effort on the part of the customer or the company.
So why all the hype? It’s a confused market. AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo are desperately looking for new revenue streams in these hard economic times, and are trying to figure out how to monetize this huge base of free instant messaging users. The “enterprise instant messaging” initiatives launched by all of these companies are just that, desperate attempts at generating some revenue, even when no apparent applications are evident.
There are real business problems to solve in the instant messaging space though. It seems that public instant messaging is here to stay, and in a big way. Along with it, come a slew of security problems for corporate networks. Everything from hacker vulnerabilities in the form of buffer overflows, to viruses, to worms, to leakage of confidential information, to legal liability because the guy in the next cubicle is chatting with his girlfriend.
Although no large players have tackled these problems, there are a couple of innovative startups that are addressing the security issues.
Akonix Systems, a San Diego company, makes a gateway product that lets IT managers reduce the security vulnerabilities of public instant messaging, by allowing a layer of policy enforcement, fine control of file transfers, virus scanning (of instant message file transfers), auditing, archiving, and reporting.
FaceTime of Foster City, CA and IMlogic of Boston, both competing for the financial services market let companies archive messages to be later searched by financial auditors, at the request of the SEC and NASD. It’s a hot market today.
IM-Age, a Houston Texas company makes a desktop product that lets users encrypt their conversations. Users simply hit a hot-key to overlay another window over the existing instant messaging clients, and all of their conversations are encrypted. It’s a very slick little product.
The interesting thing here is that all these companies let organizations continue to use free public instant messaging including AOL, MSN, Yahoo, all for a fraction of the cost of implementing any one of the other solutions.
Is there money to be made in the instant messaging space? I believe there is. Are AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo going to make the money? I don’t think so. Will AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo make money charging for corporate instant messaging features? What do you think? Talk back!
Randall Black is a network security analyst in the Los Angeles area.
