Enterprise IM is growing up, cont.
Collaboration, Instant Messaging, Risk Management, Sametime June 26th, 2007Gartner is joining other analysts, such as Forrester, in predicting that Enterprise Instant Messaging is quickly becoming a mission critical business application.
In a press release published last week, Gartner forecasts that IM will become the medium of choice for voice, video and text chat by the end of 2011.
For many knowledge workers, instant messaging (IM) is as critical as having access to a telephone or to e-mail and enterprises that haven’t already done so should start incorporating IM into their critical business processes immediately, Gartner said today. Gartner predicts that by the end of 2011, IM will be the de facto tool for voice, video and text chat with 95 percent of workers in leading global organisations using it as their primary interface for real-time communications by 2013. The worldwide market for enterprise IM is forecast to grow from $267 million in 2005 to $688 million in 2010.
The analyst firm further predicts that predominant consumer IM services such as AOL, Yahoo! and MSN Messenger will be replaced by behind-the-firewall Enterprise IM solution that provide secure and reliable communications within the enterprise while connecting to the public networks through monitored federation services. During the transition, Enterprise IM is expected to grow from it current 25% to 100% penetration within the next four years.
Gartner also touches on some of the issues surrounding security and compliance that are consistent with the recommendations I made in a previous blog post.
Technorati Tags: Gartner, Forrester, Enterprise IM, instant messaging, sametime, lcs, IM hygiene
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June 26th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
Hmmm, maybe I should move away from the email business and into the IM business…haha.
All joking aside, email has been trying to gain some share of the IM and voice message market by coming up with “unified communication” solutions, like Comcast. Hoping that people will begin to check their voice messages and IM’s like they check their email. But I believe that IM will always be preferred over email because of it’s more in the moment. Email on the other hand only comes in handy when you actually WANT time to think before you send. Both have their benefits but I would not be surprised if unified communications in IM start to see a greater adoption rate that email driven unified communications.