IM began as a teen tool for chat and became popular worldwide almost instantly. Currently, there are a number of free IM products available from well-known companies, such as AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger.

But business use of IM has been comparatively slow to catch on, mainly because of security concerns. In the early days of IM's existence, corporate employees used it unofficially, with little or no security in place.

E- and Voice-Mail Replacement

As vendors begin to develop adequate security safeguards, however, companies have started to embrace the technology.

IBM, for example, was an early corporate IM adopter. According to company estimates, about 100,000 IBM employees exchange between 1 million and 2 million instant messages each workday.

Research firm Gartner has estimated that there are now more than 100 million IM users worldwide, and that by 2005, IM will be used more often than e-mail.

Gartner also has estimated that corporations using IM could reduce internal e-mail volume by 30 to 40 percent, and voice mail volume by 10 to 15 percent.

Leading Vendors

The push is now on to devise increasingly effective and secure corporate IM systems. VeriSign and AOL have teamed up to work on encrypted IM and plan to release test software later this year.

Last month, Sprint released its Sprint Enterprise IM, which it called "the industry's first enterprise-class and secure IM platform designed specifically for corporations." In an effort to encourage adoption of the technology, Sprint is offering a free trial.

Other leading corporate IM vendors include Lotus Software Group, a subsidiary of IBM, and Groove Networks, founded by Lotus Notes e-mail software inventor Ray Ozzie.

Financial Services Go IM

Global information company Reuters announced last March that it was introducing a secure IM platform to allow financial industry users to exchange confidential information.

According to analysts, financial services is one of the business areas that can benefit most from IM. Many financial institutions are involved in creating their own IM platforms with help from vendors.

There is also pressure on Wall Street, in light of recent escalation of financial investigations, to develop better IM surveillance and archival technology.

Giving It Away

On Thursday, a California company announced it is giving away what it called the first "free and secure" corporate instant messaging platform.

Officials at Vayusphere, based in Mountain View, California, said users can download the company's IM platform free as a standalone product or in conjunction with its instant response server.

"There are a number of consumer IM platforms out there, and those you can have for no cost -- but there isn't one for the enterprise," company CEO Pushpendra Mohta told NewsFactor.

"This is a free, corporate system that runs behind the enterprise firewall and is administered and managed by the IT department," Mohta said.

'We Fill the Void'

Vayusphere said its IM platform is encrypted and offers extensive logging and archiving technology. The product supports 64- or 128-bit encryption between the IM server and client, and it can accommodate thousands of concurrent users with response times of less than a second, according to the company.

"Large enterprises have made very large investments in EAI (enterprise application integration) for connecting applications to applications," Vayusphere spokesperson Malcolm Lewis told Newsfactor.

"They're starting to make investments in corporate IM to connect people to people," Lewis said. "In both cases, they need to connect the application to people and the people to applications.

"There is this huge gap between EAI and corporate IM, and that's the void that we fill," he added.