The value and use of instant messaging (IM) applications for business will continue to increase rapidly for at least the next four years, analysts have predicted.

According to a newly released IDC study of the worldwide enterprise IM applications market, which includes IM server products as well as enterprise IM security, compliance and management products, jumped 37 per cent in terms of year-over-year revenue in 2004.

IDC expects the market to rocket from $315m in 2005 to $736m in 2009.

"With more than 28 million business users worldwide using enterprise IM products to send nearly one billion messages a day in 2005, and many more crossover corporate consumers who use consumer IM networks in the workplace, these products are clearly reaching more mainstream users," said Robert P. Mahowald, programme director for IDC's Collaborative Computing research.

"Especially in compliance-driven sectors like Wall Street, financial services and government, IM is a critical differentiator.

"In the next few years IDC expects IM, once the plaything of teenagers, to continue to grow into its role as a substantial business collaboration application."

Dedicated enterprise IM market leaders whose actions continue to shape the market have emerged and are staking their ground, IDC noted, with Microsoft's Live Communications Server and Office Communicator products driving "intense partnership" activity throughout 2004.

IBM's Lotus Sametime and Workplace Messaging offerings were found to have taken IM into new, larger-scale role-based implementations.

Jabber's capacity to support both Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol and Session Initiation Protocol helped catalyse Wall Street buyers in a transition from consumer IM to enterprise IM use.

The final main player highlighted by IDC is AOL which showed its " continued strong position" by pushing deeper into business services with the help of its many partners.

The study also found that products in the management and security segment of the enterprise IM market in 2004, demand for which had previously been driven mostly by compliance, appealed to a broader audience as the result of new relationships between vendors in this segment.

These include FaceTime, IMLogic, Akonix and the enterprise IM market leaders Jabber, Microsoft and IBM.