Enterprises should consider instant messaging (IM) as a business-critical communications tool on a par with telephone and email, Gartner advised today.

Large firms should start incorporating IM into their critical business processes immediately, according to the analyst firm.

IM will be the de facto tool for voice, video and text chat by the end of 2011, and 95 per cent of workers in leading global organisations will use it as their primary interface for real-time communications by 2013.

Gartner forecasts the worldwide market for enterprise IM to grow from $267m in 2005 to $688m in 2010.

"Although consumer IM use has been predominant in business, we expect penetration levels for enterprise grade IM to rise from around 25 per cent currently to nearly 100 per cent by the end of the decade," said David Mario Smith, a research analyst at Gartner.

Gartner advocates the use of enterprise grade IM from vendors including IBM and Microsoft to ensure that IM traffic is secured behind corporate firewalls.

Just as the deployment of email in corporations in the early 1990s proved an unparalleled success for businesses, analysts said that a similar phenomenon is occurring with IM.

"The business benefits of IM are considerable. The ability to connect people in disparate locations by text, voice and video in one application is incredibly powerful," said Smith

"IM is equally well suited to an informal 'water cooler' atmosphere as well as more formal group communications."

Although IM is displacing existing communications channels, such as email, in many instances, Smith is clear that there is no danger of it actually replacing email in the enterprise outright.

"Rather than replacing email, IM will augment and complement the use of email," he said.

"Email is an excellent and unique tool that has, in recent years, been misused and above all overused. It was never intended for real-time, snappy communications but for the conveyance of more detailed, less transitory content.

"IM excels at real-time communication and this why it sits so happily alongside email at the core of the communications and collaboration architecture of the future."