News

Enterprise IM Market Spans 28 Million Business Users Worldwide

IDC forecasts the worldwide enterprise instant messaging market -- which includes instant messaging server products as well as enterprise instant messaging security, compliance, and management products -- to grow from USD 315 million in 2005 to USD 736 million in 2009. Many business people also use consumer instant messaging networks while at work. IDC reports that the growth and perceived value clearly position enterprise instant messaging applications as mainstream business technology.

IDC expects the value, necessity, and use of instant messaging (IM) applications for business use will continue to increase at least through 2009.

"With more than 28 million business users worldwide using enterprise instant messaging products to send nearly 1 billion messages each day in 2005, and many more crossover "corporate consumers" who use consumer instant messaging networks in the workplace, these products are clearly reaching more mainstream users," said Robert P. Mahowald, program director for IDC's Collaborative Computing research. "Especially in compliance-driven sectors like Wall Street, financial services, and government, instant messaging is a critical differentiator. In the next few years, IDC expects instant messaging - once the plaything of teenagers - to continue to grow into its role as a substantial business collaboration application."

Dedicated enterprise instant messaging market leaders whose actions continue to shape the market have emerged and are staking their ground. Microsoft's LCS and Communicator products drove intense partnership activity throughout 2004; IBM's Sametime and Workplace Messaging offerings took instant messaging into new, larger-scale role-based implementations; and Jabber, equally adept at speaking XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) and SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), helped catalyze Wall Street buyers in a transition from consumer instant messaging to enterprise instant messaging use. AOL showed its continued strong position by pushing deeper into business services with the help of its many partners.

The study also found that in 2004, products in the management and security segment of the enterprise instant messaging market, 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 (FaceTime, IMLogic, Akonix etc.) and the enterprise instant messaging market leaders (Jabber, Microsoft, IBM etc.).

Wireless Developers Want Better Development Tools

Wireless developers are not satisfied with some of their most important tools, according to Evans Data's Fall 2005 Wireless Development Survey. "Wireless developers see a lot of room for improvement in their tools and it's a message that tool makers should heed in order to accelerate and enhance wireless application development and deployment," said John Andrews, Evans Data's Chief Operating Officer.

“The state of tools in wireless development represents a big opportunity for any vendor willing to step up, develop a killer tool set and take over the space,” continued Andrews.

An Evans media release on the wireless developer survey shows:

# Testing and Debugging Tools: 78% of developers say these are “extremely” or “very” important tools; only 34% rate current tools as “excellent” or “very good”.
# Wireless Emulation Tools: 63% of developers say these are “extremely” or “very” important tools; only 28% rate current tools as “excellent” or “very good” and 18% of wireless developers indicate these tools need work.

Other findings from the September 2005 survey of more than 500 wireless developers:

* Smart phones (the convergence of PDAs and mobile phones) are now the fourth most likely wireless devices to be targeted for deployment, a virtual tie with mobile phones.
* A quarter of wireless developers rely on Linux for hosting and deploying server-side applications, second only to Windows Server 2003.
* 66% of wireless developers target Java in some form or another. Java ME (previously known as J2ME) is targeted by 56% of developers. The Asia/Pacific region targets Java more than any other region at 71%.
* 52% of wireless developers use open source or Linux tools in their wireless development.


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