Avnet Hall-Mark Gets Instant-Messaging Religion

Avnet Hall-Mark saw the possibilities of realtime links to its partners and last year launched a pilot using America Online's commercial AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) service to gauge interest and get feedback. The benefits were immediate: Employees could see which colleagues or partners were online at any given time and send them a quick question, eliminating phone and e-mail "tag," Avnet executives said.

"Awareness is the big benefit. You see who's available and don't waste your time trying to track down people who are not online. That saves on e-mail and voice mail," said Dave Stuttard, vice president of applications at Avnet Computer Marketing, based here.

The whole notion of buddy lists, which show which colleagues or friends are online at a given time, is taking hold big time in the business community. AIM's Achilles' heel has been security, or a lack thereof. The messages go out as pure, unencrypted text, allowing anyone with a sniffer to eavesdrop, Stuttard said. For that reason, Avnet ended up adopting Lotus Sametime, a secure instant-messaging product that gives administrators more options for controlling access and functionality.

"We switched off all file sharing, video and audio capabilities," which eat up bandwidth, Stuttard said. Sametime uses one server inside the firewall and another outside it, and all conversations go between those servers and from the server to the community.

Avnet IM, which went live last week, is one of the applications being offered as part of the distributor's Channel Connection portal, said Cathy Serie, vice president of divisional marketing at Avnet. "The big business drivers are that we have a geographically dispersed customer base," she said. "We have field sales and inside sales, and there's nothing better than 'instant.' It brings our partners close to us."

For a reseller partner that just needs a quick question answered, instant messaging is ideal, Stuttard said. "We may need to ask for a clarification, [such as 'Is it this drive or that drive?'. In the past, you often had to phone and get a secretary to track someone down," he said.

Avnet has already registered thousands of partner staff who want to participate, Stuttard said. Several partners were so enthusiastic about the service that they asked the distributor to deploy it for their own communities, he added.

"Our original intention was to find the three or four people at each partner who talk to Avnet all day. But we found that they use it mostly among themselves," Stuttard said.

Sametime is getting some additional competition for the enterprise instant-messaging dollar. AOL, which boasts tens of millions of consumer users on its AIM and ICQ instant-messaging services, last week unveiled Enterprise AIM. The product embeds technology from FaceTime Communications. The secure service costs between $34 and $40 per user. In addition, the new AIM Enterprise Gateway, which acts as a proxy between employees inside the firewall and people outside of it, will enable mail administrators to manage use.

Although AOL has discussed entering the corporate messaging space for some time, industry observers said the online services giant has yet to earn its stripes in corporate settings--an entirely different audience than its current consumer following.

"The key challenge for AOL will be making the transition from individual end users as customers to IT departments as customers," said Michael Sampson, an analyst at Ferris Networks, a San Francisco-based market research firm. "That may be a hard sell."