Instant Messaging (IM) has come of age and is close to becoming one of those protocols that offers something for everyone. Once the province of chatty teens looking to replace phone conversations with electronic ones, IM is now a corporate mainstay and part of a new breed of applications that are built around “presence detection,” the ability to determine when someone—or something—is online and available to communicate.

Indeed, IM is rapidly spreading across the corporate world and becoming an able replacement for overflowing voicemail and e-mail inboxes that are clogged with spam and buried in irrelevant and non-time-sensitive postings. If you must get through to a busy corporate executive, IM is becoming the fastest and most effective method of communicating. Move over CrackBerry.

You can read the rest of my article that was published in Cisco’s IPJ here from their archives.