Business IM Use at 26 Percent

AOL’s third survey of instant messaging use shows IM in the workplace has grown. About 26 percent of surveyed businesspeople say they use IM at work.

At-work IM users now send IMs to communicate with colleagues (58 percent), to get answers and make business decisions (49 percent) and even to interact with clients or customers (28 percent). Twelve percent have used IM at work to avoid a difficult in-person conversation, AOL says.

Business and at-work users say they use IM because it “enables me to keep up with family and friends (47 percent). IM also “helps me to stay in touch with people I normally wouldn't be in regular contact with (43 percent).

About 38 percent say IM “helps me to get more done each business day.” About a quarter say IM is useful because it “enables me to check in on my children, providing peace of mind.”

For working moms and dads, IM’s impact is higher than the national average. In fact, 83 percent say that their day-to-day business lives have benefited from instant messaging, AOL says.

Some 11 percent say IM enhances productivity enough that they “leave the office earlier.”

Among those who use instant messaging for business purposes, 13 percent say they have their IM screen name printed on their business card, while six percent say they write it on the business cards they exchange. About 26 percent of polled New Yorkers have their IM screen names printed on their business cards.

Open Network for 700 MHz?

It isn't clear whether the proposal will survive the inevitable challenges from established carriers who won't like the idea, but Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin is said to be ready to propose an unusually "open" license for valuable 700 MHz spectrum being vacated by TV stations as they go digital.

Under Martin's proposal, mobile services in these airwaves would have to use of any compliant device and any application, with no restrictions, so long as the application is legal and doesn't harm the network.

As a platform for innovation, the new network would rival the Internet itself, moving far beyond "unlocked" phones and resembling nothing so much as a mobile version of the Internet, where any device can access any service.

Google would love it. So would most developers. So would Apple. A network of that sort basically obviates the walled garden approach the mobile industry has taken, and resembles the way any PC can access anybody or any application able to get onto the Internet.

Facebook, MySpace, Friendster Loyalty

Researchers at Parks Associates say social networking users are not loyal, citing stats showing that nearly 40 percent of MySpace users keep profiles on other social networking sites such as Friendster and Facebook. Loyalty among the smaller social networking sites is even lower, with more than 50 percent of all users actively maintaining multiple profiles.

These trends highlight a peculiar aspect of the market for social networking services, say Parks Associates researchers. Nearly half of all social networkers regularly use more than one site; one in six use three or more. The result is an increasingly interlinked environment tied together by links, widgets, and the users themselves.

I'm not sure I think this "lack of loyalty" is a problem. Communities aren't federated because the people you know are not all federated. It's just like IM systems. Not everybody uses the same client, so one is forced to use multiple clients, or a client that federates all the clients for you. Social networks are no different.

And of course smaller site users are on multiple sites. The problem with smaller sites is that no single smaller site has lots of people you want to stay in touch with as members. The point of registering with any smaller site is that somebody you might want to stay in touch with might join that particular site and not the others you are a member of.

Managed Security Shift: IPSec to SSL

border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5085539964711321346" /> The managed security service market is forecast to more than double between 2006 and
2010, when it will reach $12.1 billion, says Jeff Wilson, Infonetics Research principal analyst. But the composition of sales is changing, with more security being embedded directly into the MPLS infrastructure, says Wilson.
The managed encrypted VPN service market inched up four percent between 2005 and 2006 to $20.5 billion, but is expected to decline in coming years, says Wilson. In 2006, 49 percent of security service revenue comes from managed firewall services, 27 percent from content security and 24 pecent from other security services.

By 2010, SSL VPNs will outpace IPSec VPNs.

“Security and performance are the top driving factors when respondents are trying to decide between IPSec and SSL for VPN use, and user experience is at the bottom of the list. Many IT managers think strong security and a good user experience are mutually exclusive. It’s up to vendors to show this isn’t really the case any more,” says Wilson, principal analyst for VPNs and security at Infonetics Research.

In the managed services space; 35 percent of respondents overall (46 percent of federal government respondents) think it's critical that their provider offer SSL VPN services, says Wilson.

“MPLS services are really starting to steal business away from encrypted VPNs. This is having a significant impact on spending for managed IPSec site-to-site VPNs, especially among large organizations, who are starting to migrate from complex self-managed IPSec VPNs to simpler carrier-managed MPLS services,” Wilson says.

Google Buys Postini

Putting Google in a major position as a provider of enterprise managed email security services.

This has to be Good for 3G, 4G

According to a recent survey of about 1,000 enterprises by FreeForm Dynamics, mobile connectivity for PCs appears to be more "mission critical" than remote email access, at least in some markets. North Americans love their Blackbery and other mobile email access, to be sure. But mobile PC access arguably is more important. Forced to choose just one, I'd have to vote for mobile PC access as well, either 3G or 4G.

Enterprise IM Shift: What to Do with the PBX?

Though we take it for granted that businesses "must" use a business phone system, that might be quite so true in just several years. In fact, Gartner predicts that by the end of 2011, IM will be the de facto tool for voice, video and text chat at the largest global enterprises.

Gartner estimates that 95 percent of workers in leading global organizations will be using IM as their primary interface for real-time communications by 2013. If that proves correct, we may now be witnessing the last wave of business phone system upgrades, as lucrative as the IP phone business, in its managed, hosted and premises-based incarnations, now appears to be.

There are other possible changes in store. Voice has been a one-to-one sort of communications pattern; mostly real time but with an ever-increasing asynchronous format. But with wikis, blogs, Plaxo, Facebook and other tools with a social and "push" updating capability, more forms of communication shift to a one-to-many, asynchronous mode.

One sort of "broadcasts" what one is doing, working on or needing help with, and the network just sort of responds as appropriate. Not good for control freaks, the ego-obsessed, the self-absorbed or mildly incompetent. People who are more respected, more trusted, more helpful, more knowledgeable and open will get more help than those who are in some significant ways "non-social." Winners and losers will be produced by the shift of communication modes.

As AOL's third IM survey shows, "everybody" now uses IM in their "consumer" life roles. The issue is how that will play out in the business context.

And though one might not yet see the change in the small business market, IM systems have moved from the fringe to become a key part of an enterprise’s collaboration infrastructure and increasingly are displacing existing forms of communications from ad hoc telephone calls and emails to pre-planned meetings and video conferences, says Gartner.

For many knowledge workers, instant messaging (IM) is as critical as having access to a telephone or to e-mail and enterprises that haven’t already done so should start incorporating IM into their critical business processes immediately, say analysts at Gartner.

“Although consumer IM use has been predominant in business, we expect penetration levels for enterprise grade IM to rise from around 25 percent currently to nearly 100 percent by the end of the decade,” said David Mario Smith, Gartner research analyst.