Buddying Up with IM Lists

By Maria Trombly | Securities Industry News | February 2, 2004

February 2, 2004 - Some days, I wish my phone worked the same as my instant messaging buddy list. In IM, I can see at a glance who's around and who's not, who's away from his computer and who's too busy to talk. All I have to do to chat with someone is click on his name.

It turns out that technology vendors have read my mind. All kinds of companies that provide communications tools to Wall Street are busy creating IM-style front ends for their services, or joining forces with IM companies, or adding multimedia to their existing IM platforms.

However, according to Sara Radicati, president and CEO at the Radicati Group, fully functional, integrated multimedia IM is still three to four years away.
Even if the benefits won't start showing up on desktops for a few months--or a few years--that's just fine with many firms that are still working to integrate bare-bones IM into the enterprise.

"At least in the corporate market, companies are still struggling with plain IM," she said. "The idea of multimedia is quite premature right now."

Reuters Group, which offers the popular Reuters IM product for the securities industry, is developing application and desktop sharing for IM users. That means help desks can take over computers to fix problems, corporate trainers can take new hires through the applications they need to do their work and sales staffers can take their clients through financial simulations--all from the comfort of an IM buddy list.

Susan Phemister, Reuters' business development director for collaboration services, said the company also plans to add chat, autodial telephone calls, virtual white-boarding and video to its IM platform. "We are 100-percent developing those for 2005," she says.

One nifty IM tool that will be available is predefined IM templates, or forms. An employee who regularly sends certain requests through IM--say, a floor trader--can set up a form so that he only needs to enter the bid, ask and close in order to cut down on the keystrokes he has to type every day.

"It makes it easier for market professional to communicate back and forth," she said. "The clients are banging down the door for that one. It sounds so simplistic but that is the very first thing they ask for."

In two or three years, the forms could be integrated with a firm's order management system, she added. But, so far, there's isn't much call for things like video, she said.

Trailblazing
Deutsche Bank has rolled out video conferencing at thousands of desktops, but few other firms have followed suit. "We get it, Deutsche Bank gets it; once everyone else gets it, we'll be rolling it out," Phemister says.

In fact, Deutsche Bank uses a desktop video conferencing system from Avistar for internal and external video communications. It's currently on 2,500 desks throughout the company, and on a number of client and partner desks.

But so far, the video conferencing and the instant messaging are on two separate systems that don't communicate with one another, said Stephen Messinger, global head of equity research distribution at Deutsche Bank Securities.

Instead, the Avistar communication bar looks a lot like an IM buddy list. "The way I have mine set up, there's a bar down the right-hand side of the screen, where I can put in one-click buttons for all the people that I talk to on a regular basis," Messinger said. "In one quick view, I can look at my screen and tell if the person I need to speak to is at his desk or not."

Unlike many IM systems, Avistar doesn't have a way of showing whether people have left their desks without logging off--the "idle" status. "It's pretty common on trading floors and trading desks that people just leave their computers on all the time," Messinger said.

Avistar users also can't send quick messages to one another to set up video calls. Instead, the messages go through dbStickies, Deutsche Bank's own internal IM system.

According to John Carlson, VP of marketing at Avistar, the vendor probably won't be building its own "idle" sensor, nor its own IM capabilities. Instead, it will likely partner with existing enterprise IM providers. That's probably "many months away," he said.

Another common IM feature will arrive sooner--communication policy management.

Today, some popular Wall Street IM systems, like Communicator's Hub IM, allow firms to define which users are allowed to talk to which other users. That's going to be available on Avistar's system with a few weeks, Carlson said.

Meanwhile, Deutsche's Messinger is worried about potential IM confusion if Avistar rolls out its own IM functionality. "We would want to have one standard for messaging internally, one system that you use, and we kind of achieved that with the dbStickies right now," he said. "As soon as you try to have two different systems, and there's not a set standard, that's when the problems are going to arise."

Jumping-Off Point
Because the IM interface is so intuitive and easy to use, many companies are looking at using it as a launching pad for everything from Web conferences to telephone calls, and even video-room conferences.

"This is definitely going to change the way that most enterprise messaging and collaboration is run, there's no doubt about it," said Andrew Davis, managing partner and senior analyst at Wainhouse Research. "This is a technology trend that is of great importance. We expect it to influence voice, audio and video communications, and 2004 is the year."

And it's not just niche conferencing and IM vendors that are paving the path toward convergence, he added. Large players like Microsoft, IBM and Oracle are also on board.

One application that's already here is automatic dialing. Say, for example, you're in an IM chat session with five other people, working on an issue. It's getting too complicated for IM, and someone says, "Let's move this to a voice conference."

You click on the appropriate button on the screen, and everyone's telephone immediately rings.

That's the service offered by eDial, with can put an IM front end-even a Web-based IM front end-on your telephone system, both traditional PBX and VoIP. The company works with IBM's Lotus Workplace (formerly Sametime), and the Microsoft Live Communication Server, and is a partner of Reuters. EDial also partners with gateways like IM Logic and Facetime, which allows access to public IM networks.

Because of the Web-based interface, eDial's IM front end can even be integrated into a firm's workflow portals, said Scott Petrack, the company's CTO. "IM buddies can be allocated by the back office as part of the portal login," he said.

Meanwhile, Facetime is working to allow IM users to easily set up Web conferences, forming partnerships with all the big names, said CTO Jonathan Christensen. For example, the company just announced a deal with Latitude, recently acquired by Cisco.

While users are in IM chat mode, they would type "go latitude" to trigger a Latitude conference, to share slides, data conferencing or voice conferencing.

"IM is going to be the signaling platform for a lot of multimedia communications," Christensen said. "With instant messaging, you already have the session with the other user, and we see that a lot of multimedia collaboration is going to migrate to that channel."

Among the other IM-conferencing alliances that are forming up, is a deal between Yahoo! and WebEx that allows Yahoo! IM users to escalate to WebEx conferences, said Robert Mahowald, an analyst at International Data Corp. And Microsoft plans to integrate its enterprise IM service, Live Communication Server, with its Live Meeting conference product (formerly PlaceWare), he added.

"If you're a big-time IM user, especially in business, it's most optimal if it's integrated with something else," he said.

That even goes for communications that don't seem to lend themselves easily to an IM interface. For example, Tandberg video conferencing involves special video conferencing rooms, not individual users' desktops.

But even Tandberg is tying IM-based presence awareness into its platform."Today, we are actually launching an IM client," said Mike Walker, the company's head of emerging technology concepts. Tandberg counts Credit Suisse First Boston, ABN Amro, HypoVereinsbank, Reuters and Pareto Securities among its clients.

Since video conferencing rooms are typically shared resources, the Tandberg system interacts with a scheduling application, like Microsoft Exchange, to check room availability. It also works with Microsoft's Messenger IM service and plans to support enterprise IM products like those from IBM and Microsoft.

The Tandberg IM-based system will also interact with video conferencing systems from other companies, Walker said.

Too Much, Too Soon?
But not everybody is ready to roll out multimedia IM systems that would, say, allow users to make PowerPoint or video presentations.

"Multimedia IM kind of defeats the purpose of IM," said Damon Kovelsky, an analyst at Financial Insights. "Instant messaging is informal communications. Anytime you have to do a presentation, you're dealing with formal communications."

And some firms are still struggling with IM's very existence.

"The only reason we left instant messaging up and running is because of our institutional traders," said Lee Blackmore, director of information technology at Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. "Otherwise, we would probably shut it down for the whole company."

Only 175 employees are allowed to use instant messaging, out of some 1,200 total employees at the firm, he said. And they're not allowed to even exchange attachments through IM, much less multimedia, because of security concerns.

"We don't want to have anything come in that infects the network," said Blackmore.