Microsoft joins a list of technology's biggest names that have signalled their intent to compete for the corporate IM market, including AOL Time Warner's America Online unit, Yahoo!, IBM's Lotus division, Sun Microsystems and Oracle. A host of smaller players such as IMLogic, FaceTime, Bantu and Jabber are partnering approaching this market as partners and burgeoning players in the market. All of these companies are responding to heightened demand by corporate information systems departments for control over the growing number of IM clients running on their networks. IM has taken off in the enterprise, according to analysts, and has become a popular way for workers to communicate and multitask. In 2002, 84 percent of enterprises surveyed had IM software running on their network, according to research firm Osterman Research. This year, that percentage is expected to rise to 91 percent, and nearly 100 percent in 2007, the study predicted. Most of this growth has come from the grassroots level. People at work have downloaded popular free IM services such as AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), ICQ, MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger, under the noses of their IT managers. It wasn't long until IT departments began noticing volumes of data being exchanged through insecure holes in the firewalls. Although companies in tightly regulated industries such as finance have blocked free IM and implemented their own software, other attempts in companies have met resistance from people already hooked on IM. This trend has turned into an opportunity for the public IM providers and enterprise software vendors. The free providers have announced plans to launch versions bundled with encryption, security, authentication and logging. It also allows them to charge fees for IM, which has remained militantly free for people to download. Corporate IT demands for greater control over IM and fears about unfettered data exchange have sparked a push among software vendors to incorporate IM into their enterprise suites. Lotus' Sametime IM service currently leads the pack, according to analysts, but other vendors such as Sun are planning to launch their own standalone products. Microsoft's two heads
Microsoft stands alone in approaching enterprise IM from both sides of the firewall. The beta release of Greenwich highlights the urgency the Microsoft has placed on enterprise IM, partly because it smells a market opportunity, but mostly because it is playing catch-up. The biggest issue facing Greenwich is interoperability. Microsoft is trying to figure out how to allow Greenwich users communicate with MSN's millions of IM users without diluting the business application. In contrast to direct software sales to businesses, MSN Messenger loses money, and is used to amass free users with the hope of upgrading them one day to paid users. Greenwich supports an interoperability standard called Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which is also supported by Lotus' Sametime, but not currently supported by AOL, Yahoo! or even MSN Messenger. It would be easier for Greenwich to interoperate with Sametime, and the companies have hinted their interest in doing so. Connecting the enterprise with MSN will be key for Greenwich to flourish in the long term. Although Microsoft officials would not elaborate on their plans for the two sides to work closer together, its use of third-party provider IMLogic may be a short-term patch while it figures out its Greenwich-MSN relationship. "Eventually a subsequent version of MSN messenger will come out that does use SIP and they will be interoperable," said Charles Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research. "They're now using (IMLogic's) interoperability as not only a stopgap but as a quicker time to market to solve compatibility issues."
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