Everyone's Talking About Group Chat

Chat also is a fairly lightweight application. "It isn’t another system or a standalone application that IT needs to train people on or integrate into other systems, or something that I have to force people to use," Jabber’s Saint-Andre says. "It’s a natural way to talk and easy to build on."

One illustration of this is automotive company Reynolds and Reynolds, which uses Jabber servers to monitor the status of its own software at numerous car dealerships around the world. The IT department at Reynolds can quickly see if the software is down and take steps to get it working again.

Accredited Home Lenders is using online chat sessions to provide its loan brokers with a secure and reliable means of communicating in real time with loan specialists to resolve issues about loan applications. And Ecreation built a virtual disk jockey for a Dutch radio station that broadcasts over the Internet, allowing the station to take requests from listeners around the world via Microsoft’s IM network.

Finally, Microsoft is encouraging future developments and interoperability. The company has come out with a new version of its Live Communications Server that can be easily extended by many partners and commercial software vendors to support chat applications. It also supports the Session Initiation Protocol, which can be incorporated in many other chat systems, such as Parlano’s.

GAINING POPULARITY, BUT . . .
With such obvious, myriad benefits, the question arises as to why chat hasn’t become more accepted by business IT departments.

All told, chat continues to be on the rise, and companies such as Jabber, Jive, Parlano, and Reuters have seen growth spurts in their installed base during the past year, largely because once chat enters a company, it takes hold and grows quickly. Says Parlano’s Fera: "Our application is the first one that they turn on, and the last one that they turn off at night."