Instant messaging has come of age. No longer the province of chatty teenagers, it is now part and parcel of advanced communications networks at many corporations. And as instant messaging takes hold, companies are benefiting from new productivity gains and improvements in customer-response time.
“I almost never get e-mail from my Sun colleagues,” said Tim Bray, an avid instant messager and director of Web technologies for Sun Microsystems. “And I only get voice mails from outsiders.”
Sun isn’t the only technology company to embrace instant messaging. “We send 2.5 million IMs within IBM each day,” says David Marshak, senior product manager for collaboration at IBM. “And we have virtually zero voice mails here.”
A sign of instant messaging’s growing corporate rise came earlier this year when IBM said it would open its Lotus Sametime product, a messaging platform currently used by more than 15 million workers at thousands of companies, to other messaging systems.
Years ago, when PCs were spreading through corporations, many companies eliminated secretaries on the theory that the machines would enable professionals to do their own typing and send their own messages by e-mail. But phishing attacks, viruses and spam have clogged e-mail networks, and voice-mail boxes are also overflowing.
Now a generation of office workers who grew up with instant messaging has gained control. They have made IM the latest trend in information technology. Along the way, they have changed how the corporate world converses and have built a series of new communication applications.
“With IM, I know that someone is available, so I can take rapid action to support more real-time operations,” said Ashley Roach, a server product manager at Jabber Inc., which sells open-source instant messaging server software.
Instant messaging is becoming an important ingredient for corporations that want to respond rapidly to demands from inside and outside. They are using it to tie customers closer together and to enable workers to communicate across the globe.
Banks, insurance companies and other old-school businesses are using instant messaging to communicate with customers and quickly route queries, all within seconds.
In the not-so-distant past, e-mail was considered state of the art, and responding within 24 hours was considered prompt. Those days seem quaint now; instant messaging is used in more than 80 percent of corporations, according to a report by Michael Osterman, an industry analyst.