IM coming of age

Instant messaging doesn't mean a whole lot to those who don't use it. To the rest of us, it's nothing short of a godsend, given the levels of spam clogging email inboxes and its direct, no nonsense style of communication.

The medium itself has been around for years but there are several reasons why 2003 is its 'tipping point'. Most importantly, it has reached a critical mass. Don't use IM? Consider all those friends and colleagues who are chatting to someone else. And on a business level, thousands of companies are now settling on IM products, whether popular consumer versions or increasingly enterprise IM offerings.

And as the need to be compliant with regulations and standards becomes a must, enterprise level IM should also prove a real growth area for a slightly stagnant IT industry - because nobody is going to offer secure, accountable, auditable IM for free. These aren't kids chatting pop music, these are businesses using their IM to nail down million dollar deals. It will happen.

At the start of the year, Gartner called for IM to be among the issues heading CIOs' To Do lists in Europe. We live in a continent that is behind the curve with IM, partly because of the success of SMS as a personal, point-to-point messaging medium, but IM will have its day - even over mobile in some cases, though that will be a story for next year and beyond.

(And for those who think IM is a time-wasting device for skivers at work, Gartner analysy Mark Raskino duly noted: "You can't be that curmudgeonly and stupid - people said the same thing about email, the web and mobiles at work.")

Perhaps most importantly of all, the main providers of consumer IM software - AOL (also including the pioneering ICQ service), Microsoft and Yahoo! - are joining established providers in the enterprise market.

Now this is a tough sell to some IT departments and MDs who realise the consumer product is typically free while business IM costs.

However, as silicon.com's latest special report illustrates (http://www.silicon.com/im ), rolling out IM properly is about management, security, innovative applications of the technology and choosing the right product.

At the end of last year we ran an article entitled 'Instant messaging - you will end up using it', and we stand by that claim, at least to the extent that any of us use email or the web.

One of the questions we'll ask more than once over coming weeks is how IM has crept into businesses, often under the radar of IT departments. There's a negative, control-minded way of looking at that, which is natural for IT bosses. For others running a business, there's a positive spin - here you find your staff turning to a simple application of their own accord, without it being forced down their throats, for clear business benefit (as well as a bit of idle chit-chat). Harness that. Don't miss the IM boat.