IM marches on relentlessly

Osterman Research have just wrapped up their twice-yearly tracking survey of instant messaging (IM) in the workplace. The results are not particularly stunning, but they reflect the maturation of the IM market and its continued growth, despite all the security risks.

Here are some of the results from the research:

• 26% of e-mail users in the workplace use IM on a regular basis while at work, up slightly from 24% as found in the March survey. This figure continues to creep up consistently as new users realize the benefits of using IM in the workplace.
• 52% of organizations are using IM for real-world business applications, identical to what we found in our last survey. While this figure is impressive given that consumer IM clients dominate the use of IM in the workplace, this figure is expected to climb significantly as organizations roll out their own enterprise-grade IM systems and/or provide enterprise features to the current base of IM clients, instead of relying solely on the viral nature of IM to expand its use.
• 2/3 of organizations are concerned or very concerned about the potential for viruses, worms and other threats to enter their networks through IM. This is the highest percentage of respondents that are this concerned since this question was added to the tracking survey last year. This concern is due, in large part, to the well-publicized nature of the growing number of IM threats that have affected IM systems - the number of IM threats so far in 2005 is dramatically higher than for all of 2004.
• The three leading consumer IM clients - AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger - continue to be the three leading workplace IM clients. Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing (Sametime) continues as the leading enterprise IM system in use, although Microsoft Live Communication Server continues to increase its penetration. Surprisingly, Google Talk is already present in a significant percentage of the organizations surveyed, despite the fact that it was introduced only recently.

Here are some previous blog postings on IM : IM users soar to 867 million, IM Security in a mess!, Four ways to secure IM, Public or private IM debate, Thirty two IM rules and IM in the firing line.

CATEGORIES: 1research, 1survey, 1IM, 1users, 1stats