"IM is growing rapidly. Some 200 million users worldwide have signed up of IM IDs on the major free services. Gartner estimates that by 2003, 70 percent of enterprises will have workers using such services. Like e-mail before it, IM has tremendous potential for improving worker productivity. Properly managed and integrated into business workflows, IM can dramatically increase a company's ability to operate as a real-time enterprise. "
-Gartner Group Oct. 2001

The popularity of IM is such that by 2004, according to research group IDC, IM will be used by over 180 million employees at work and an estimated two trillion messages will be sent globally by both consumers and business users.