PCWorld writes about how companies are benefitting from the use of Instant Messaging:
Throughout September and October 2003, Forrester surveyed about 1000 companies to see what their purchasing plans were for IM in 2004. Root says 25 percent of these companies already had some sort of IM up and running; about 50 percent didn’t have any plans or didn’t know what the company’s plans were; and the remaining 25 percent were considering purchasing or piloting an IM product in 2004. Two-thirds of these companies had annual revenues greater than $1 billion, while the remaining 33 percent had annual revenues between $500 million to $1 billion.
“Right now it’s kind of like the wild, wild west out there. The companies that are progressive are really going after [IM] and are trying to find solutions very quickly,” Root says.
Today, IBM’s IM users average about 3 million messages per day, up from 2.5 million messages per day in 2002. The company has also seen a 4 percent reduction in telephone use, and a reduction in the load on its e-mail servers.
IBM employees communicate primarily with each other, but can also communicate with certain applications. For example, Reuss-Caton says there are several apps, including a dictionary and the corporate directory, to which users can send IM queries and receive responses. For example, if Reuss-Caton queries the database with an employee name, it would return all the employee’s details, including presence awareness information telling her whether that individual is online.
