Instant Messaging: The Business Case

Blogger: Bill Pray

What is the business case for instant messaging?

For years, IM has been marketed to enterprises as:

• Enabling new agility and responsiveness in the organization through real-time communication

• Reducing latency of communication transactions

• Improving coordination

• Enabling rapid response

• Facilitating globalization

And while all of this can be true of IM in an enterprise, it can be very difficult to assign a value or a ROI to these statements. The difficulty to assign hard monetary value to IM is, I argue, one of the major reasons enterprise IM has not been implemented as ubiquitously as many have anticipated. Current enterprise IM seat count is estimated to be just a little shy of 50 million. When you compare that to consumer IM, which is approaching 150 million seats, it becomes an interesting question of: "Why is IM not being deployed more widely in the enterprise after a decade of solutions being available?"

For an IT department, implementing enterprise IM means another service to manage, monitor, and maintain. Furthermore, because it is a real-time communication tool, expectations are high and down time is immediately noticed by users. Understandably, the IT department is not always enamoured with enterprise IM.

While researching this question of enterprise IM ROI for my next document, I have found that many enterprises resort to specific use cases to help them assign value to enterprise IM. There are nearly a dozen different use cases that I have identified for enterprise IM that provide benefits.

The major vendors (Cisco, IBM, and Microsoft) include enterprise IM in unified communications platforms, making it part of a much broader business case.

I am interested in hearing your opinion and experiences. How does your enterprise answer the question of the ROI value of IM? Please add your comments or send me an e-mail at bpray@burtongroup.com. I would enjoy an IM from you also, but federation is one of the other major issues preventing the adoption of enterprise IM and prevents that option from being easily possible. 

Comments

[Peter de Haas]

Bill,

Some good questions.

First of all consumer IM is already way beyond 150M users. Windows Live Messenger alone has over 300M users globally.

My guess at why the uptake in the enterprise is taking longer would be :

- The killer communication app in the enterprise is email .. hard to replace.

- Because IM is such a big hit in the consumer space many enterprises have viewed it as a consumer "gossip" solutions.

As for the ROI / value question

To me the true value of IM (related) solutions is :

- Presence ... Presence is the true value which is provided through the IM solution. Presence is the first point of call and triggers all communications based on a person's availability.

- Unified Communications .. You already mentioned the approach of Cisco and Microsoft and others. BY approaching IM not as a silo technology but rather a part of the Unified Communications platform you can realize more benefits. IN Microsoft Netherlands for example no one uses a normal telephone or IP phone; everyone uses Microsoft Communicator / Office Communications Server integrated with telephony / Office Live Meeting

So all communications integrated, no hardphones, prensence based communication ... this is real added value

[Bill Pray]

Thanks for the excellent comments Peter.

Also, thanks for pointing out the discrepancy in the numbers. I meant to say that the 150M was in the U.S. alone (per Nielsen), not to mention worldwide adoption.

[Sam Kleinman]

The most powerful thing about the enterprise class IM solutions--particularly like those from Cisco and IBM--is that they're built on top of XMPP, which does something pretty unique, that we might be prone to forgetting about other wise:

XMPP provides the capibility of state-full (as opposed to HTTPs statelessness) real-time and push-based information exchange. It's not just sending instant messages, but also transmitting other streams of data. With these technological capabilities in hand, the applications are incredibly diverse. A calendar application could be deployed as a publication/subscription (PubSub) node so that notifications and changes can be pushed in real time to all subscribers. Multi-User chat capability is already useful for members of a team to share links and other data during larger conference calls. You could also imagine how "one way" IMs might be able to replace intercoms, and streamline some communication. The technology has a lot of applications, on top of conventional instant messaging, which may or may not be particularly useful, depending on the needs of a given organization.

Also, running XMPP tools locally rather than relying on AIM or Yahoo, gives administrators much more control over the system. In addition to tools from Cisco and Process.One there are many very good open source tools that also make XMPP pretty attractive and adaptable. But the implications of use, and how organizations might adapt their process to using real-time/push services like this is still very much an open question.

[Nation Hahn]

Nice work on the piece. I will point out that Brosix - disclaimer: a company I work for - actually hosts the enterprise instant messaging server on our own which can reduce the stress of IT guys all over since they do not have to focus on monitoring our company servers. Perhaps most importantly for them it can help relieve the stress on their enterprise email servers - making their life a lot simpler.

Of course we are the upstart in the field compared to Cisco, etc. but I think the company relishes the challenge.