Will Enterprise IM Survive

Stu questions whether Enterprise IM will survive, I think the answer to that is – it depends.

Information passed across an IM session may well be corporate information. In order for enterprises to be comfortable about this information being passed across a public network using an external provider a number of assurances need to be in place:

• Deliverable service levels, preferably contractually agreed service levels.
• Protection from malicious attack; virus, malware, etc.
• Encryption of conversations.
• Verifiable identity.

Many organisations will also have auditing requirements for a specific set of individuals, so will need the ability to capture and store the information being exchanged.

None of these requirements preclude the use of publicly available IM, but these things are all much easier to control when you are in control of the environment.

The other advantage to operating the environment internally is that you are in control of the end user experience. That control can provide benefits that may not be delivered through the publicly available service.

One example where this might apply in IM terms is in the provision of bots which perform specific business purposes.

Another example would be the creation of an integrated experience for communications. This argument is less clear cut than it used to be. The extensibility of the publicly available services mean has resulted in many enterprise environments being less rich than services that are freely available over the Internet. Many of these services are reaching the point of delivering the entire integrated communications experience anyway.

In conclusion: I don’t see the end of enterprise IM any time soon because the assurance issues are too soft and diverse to be resolved quickly. I do see time, though, when enterprises take more services from external providers over the Internet. I’m not sure IM will be one of the priorities though.

Tags: IM