Instant Messaging: The Next Three Years

[Fanatic]

PALO ALTO, CA - The Radicati Group, Inc.'s latest study, "Instant Messaging Market, 2008-2012," offers an in-depth analysis of the market for Instant Messaging. The study divides the market into four segments: Public IM, Enterprise IM, IM Management & Security, and IM Aggregators. It provides installed base and revenue market share by vendor, four-year forecasts, and breakouts by region and business size for each segment of the market.

In the past year, Instant Messaging vendors have seen a significant shift from enterprises using Public IM to purchasing and deploying Enterprise IM networks with enhanced security and robust administrative control functions. In the consumer IM market, providers have begun adding various new features to keep users engaged with SMS text messaging, voice and video chat capabilities, and Web 2.0 interactivity-type features, such as avatars, tool bars, games, music, social networking capabilities, and various background designs.

According to the study, IM accounts will grow from 1.8 billion in 2008, to over 3.7 billion by 2012.

[jencan]

it is scary to think where texting is going to go...soon people are going to be texting each other viruses...has texting technically been added to the dictionary?

[NationHahn]

I work for an enterprise IM company - Brosix - and I am eager to see how, where, and why instant messaging will grow in the next several years. It is a fairly old technology - as far as the web goes - and yet its popularity endures and grows. I think enterprise IM, which is still in the nascent stages, is going to be a fairly large growth sector.

I mean, we at Brosix offer secure, encrypted IM on a network of the companies design that we host on our own servers. The management can decide who is on the network, authenticate users, and generally make sure that their instant communication remains within the company. We also offer powerful collaboration tools that allow people to interact with clients or co-workers who might be across the world for all we know.

At any rate thanks for sharing the link to the study - it looks to be quite interesting.

[kelseyc]

Enterprise instant messaging is on the rise-- as more and more companies become worried about security of online communication, the more secure they will want I'm to be.