Instant Messaging in the Enterprise: How developers are using IM APIs to interface with back-end systems

As football great Vince Lombardi once said, "There's no I in team." But there's certainly one in IM. Instant messaging is being used increasingly by enterprise teams-authorized or not-as a means to communicate and collaborate in real time.

Indeed, it might surprise IT administrators to learn that 85 percent of U.S. enterprises today use the technology, according to a study published by tech research firm Radicati Group in June 2004.

Along with the rise of free services such as AOL's Instant Messenger, Microsoft's MSN and Yahoo Messenger-which by their nature track and display a user's status through PC activity-have come tools to allow developers to tap into what software vendors are calling "presence information" and integrate it within their applications.

"Instant messaging has become the lifeblood of the trading floor," said Furqan Nazeeri, CEO of IMTRADER, a Boston-based ISV that develops IM-based solutions for the securities trading industry. "The problem is that IM networks are disconnected from enterprise systems."

To bridge the gap, Pivot develops and markets IMTRADER, a tool that Nazeeri said replaces publicly available IM clients with one that integrates IM networks with the trading networks of brokers. "IMTRADER allows you to use IM as a front end for accessing financial [information from] a broker's system," and conducting trades through an IM window.

He said that from its most practical standpoint, IMTRADER is useful simply by helping to eliminate trading errors. "Over the phone, 'Buy 50,000 IBM' sounds a lot like 'Buy 50,000 IPN.' There are classes of errors that get reduced by having things typed out and integrated without rekeying." He claimed that several customers using the tool now handle 90 percent or more of orders electronically. "Before, everything was over the phone."

Underlying IMTRADER is the IMLinkage middleware and API from IMlogic. IMLinkage, delivered as plug-ins to Visual Studio or Eclipse, intercepts IM traffic and provides an API that according to CEO Francis deSouza, blends APIs of the disparate IM networks. "All the IM clients have the notion of idle, but might use different words" to indicate that condition, such as idle or away. "We provide a single, consistent and unified way to integrate your applications with the different IM networks."

The IMLinkage tools also are being used at Thompson Financial to enhance an existing application that lists which traders are registered to do a particular trade, deSouza said. "We're working with them to build presence into that so you can see not only who [has] registered interest for the trade, but also if they are present. As a trader, that's valuable because instead of calling all the people on the list, you can focus on the people that are available right now."

IMlogic and others like it also introduce the concept of virtual buddies, software-based automatons that can reside in a user's buddy list and respond automatically to stimulus. Competing with IMlogic is Akonix Systems, which develops L7 Builder, a server, API and libraries for Java and .NET that let developers create virtual buddies and the back-end logic that gives them functionality.

Francis Costello, chief marketing officer at Akonix, said his company developed an automaton for directory lookups. "It responds to my IM queries by accessing the data and feeding it back to me within that IM window as if it were a person looking stuff up in the directory," he said, adding that such applications can perform far more complex tasks.

One such task was described by deSouza, who said he was perplexed when approached by a major hospitality chain that was looking to create a branded IM presence for booking hotel rooms. "We said, 'You can do all that on a Web site. Why do it on IM?' Their interesting response was, 'When our customers got fax machines, we needed a fax interface. When they got e-mail and Web, we needed e-mail and Web. Now our clients are on IM, so we need to open up an IM storefront.'"

A still more complex example was offered by Pivot's Nazeeri, who claimed that developers use IMTRADER to monitor IM exchanges between money managers and brokers, for example, and perform actions based on key phrases passing between them.

"The broker might say that Cisco is going to be moving on pre-open news, and you say, 'Great, b50k cisco,'" said Nazeeri. "IMTRADER would understand that as a trade and would step in and offer a challenge response to the buy side, send it to the broker's trading system, and send back an acknowledgement. It's a virtual buddy on top of an existing communication. We call that a bionic buddy."

There are some serious downsides to tying enterprise applications to public networks, the most obvious of which is security. Both Akonix and IMlogic offer optional logging, filtering and other measures to stop or limit unwanted traffic.

Another possible pitfall is protocol switching, which according to Jake Jacoby, CEO of managed protection services company Singlefin, occurs with some regularity among the public network providers. "Unless you sign a deal with AOL, MSN and Yahoo, they make it difficult; they're big players and they own the space," and change their protocols to prevent unlicensed ISVs like multiprotocol client developer Trillian from gaining a foothold illegally. Akonix and IMlogic have such deals. "So if they change their protocols, you could put a lot of development into a really cool app and find that suddenly it no longer works."