CRN Network, September 9, 2009, 1230 hrs
Instant Messaging (IM) is the second most popular and widely used collaboration and communication tool in business enterprises across Asia-Pacific after e-mail, says a research from Springboard Research. The report adds that nearly two-thirds of IM-using organizations ranked it as their top collaboration tool in terms of usage.
The report also notes that enterprise IM applications have started gaining attention from businesses, even though a majority of businesses in Asia-Pacific use consumer IM tools. Findings of this report are based on Springboard’s interviews with 469 CIOs, IT managers and business managers in over 400 large and SMB enterprises in Australia, New Zealand, China, India, Malaysia, Philippines and Singapore.
“IM is now recognized as an important communication tool and in many organizations. IM complements or even replaces relatively more expensive phone calls as a means of long distance intra and inter-organization communication. Consumer IM tools are a key catalyst for organizations that go on to deploy more integrated and advanced communication and collaboration platforms,” said Balaka Baruah Aggarwal, Senior Research Manager, Emerging Software, Springboard Research.
The Springboard report adds that IT vendors’ increased focus on the enterprise IM market in the recent months has emerged as a key market driver. With the exception of China, multinational vendors like Microsoft, Yahoo and IBM dominate the IM landscape in Asia-Pacific. In China, local vendors like Tencent and mobile IM provider PICA have a significant presence.
“IM is an effective entry point for vendors to sell their integrated communications and collaboration platforms to organizations. User organizations are driving further growth of enterprise IM applications as they push for more security and more comprehensive and integrated communications and collaboration platforms,” Aggarwal added. |