Interoperability
When I first started covering the EIM space, I assumed that every company, organization and governmental body out there would be clamoring for EIM products/services that would interoperate with the public IM networks -- AOL's AIM, ICQ, Microsoft's MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger.
Boy, was I wrong.
As I speak with EIM vendors, venture capitalists and users of EIM, I'm getting a clear roadmap of where companies want to be with interoperability. When searching for an EIM system, enterprises either know for sure they want interoperability, or they absolutely know they want no part of it. There's no in-between whatsoever.
On the "no public IM" side are industry groups that are notoriously secretive. For some reason, the petrochemical group is usually mentioned. I don't know why, mainly because I don't know enough about that market segment. By the way...Attention EIM vendors: Go after petrochemical companies.
Other companies in the "no public IM" camp merely do not want their employees IM'ing the day away with family and friends. I only hope that those enterprises cut off their phone networks from the rest of the world, too, because that's essentially what they want to do with IM.
Companies that do want public IM interoperability are generally the ones that deal with consumers, rather than those in the B2B environment.
For the "want public IM" group, I don't have any good news in the interoperability department. Only some EIM vendors offer it -- Imici, Bantu and Jabber immediately come to mind. And if you don't want to invest in a full EIM system, then Trillian is a good way to go, as long as AOL doesn't put up any more roadblocks to that client. But there has not been a lot of progress in the push to make the public IM clients and networks interoperable. In fact, the movement seems to have lost steam.
On the public IM side, only Trillian and a few other clients enable interoperability. If you don't want to use one of those, though, you're stuck with using your PC's memory resources to run multiple IM clients.
The Future
All of the pundits, myself included, have weighed in on the growth of EIM. Everyone says the market is only at its beginning and has a ways to go before it reaches maturity. But no consensus exists on the current state of the market.
Osterman Research surveyed more than 160 companies last March. The firm reported that 29% of those surveyed said they already use IM, while another 11% said "they're not using it but will do so," and 31% said they're "not using it but may do so." What's more, the use of the public IM nets dominated in the Osterman Research survey's results. IDC estimated that 18.5 million people will use IM in the enterprise this year -- a number that is expected to increase to 229 million by 2005, with revenues growing from $133 million to $1.1 billion by 2005. And Gartner Inc. said more than 70% of all companies in the U.S. will use IM by next year.
In a survey I wrote last March for my company's INT Media Research division, 47% of the companies surveyed said they currently use some kind of IM system. Of that figure, 24% provide enterprise-strength IM access, while 76% allow employees to use IM supplied by a public provider.
From a security standpoint, one thing is for sure -- enterprise IM developers absolutely need to wean companies off of using public IM networks and their highly insecure clients by selling them a corporate-strength IM system. If an enterprise absolutely feels it needs to use the public IM nets and clients, it can at least use a security program like Akonix 7, which is designed for use in conjunction with public IM'ing.
I also predicted six-plus months ago that some kind of "super worm" or other threat will one day plague companies using public IM. While I'm glad it hasn't happened yet, enterprises still need to guard against such a catastrophe. In my INT Media Research study, only 8% of companies surveyed cited IM as a security risk. That figure should be at 100%, when it comes to the use of the public IM networks.
And on a completely different note -- thanks to Kirkland, Wash.-based LINQware for coining the acronym "EIM." I've already been using it, and I'll continue to utilize it from here on out. As the EIM market continues to grow, we all have a chance to develop our own lingo. If you have a term to add to ones like EIM, public IM net, wireless IM and so on, please e-mail me with them. If I get a lot of responses, I'll publish them in some kind of "lingo" guide.
Bob Woods is the managing editor of InstantMessagingPlanet.
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