Enterprise IM gaining ground

SINGAPORE: Instant messaging (IM) is the second most popular and widely used collaboration and communication tool in business enterprises across Asia Pacific after email, says the latest research report by Springboard Research, a leading innovator in the IT Market Research industry.

Springboard’s report, titled “Instant Messaging in Asia Pacific Enterprises: Key Trends and Market Insights” 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 instant messaging applications has started gaining attention from businesses, even though a majority of businesses in Asia Pacific use consumer instant messaging 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,” said Balaka Baruah Aggarwal, senior research manager – Emerging Software at Springboard Research. “Consumer instant messaging tools are a key catalyst for organizations that go on to deploy more integrated and advanced communication and collaboration platforms,”  Aggarwal added.

Enterprise IM gaining ground

The Springboard report adds that IT vendors’ increased focus on the enterprise instant messaging 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 instant messaging landscape in Asia Pacific. In China, local vendors like Tencent and mobile instant messaging provider PICA have a significant presence.

“Instant messaging 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 instant messaging applications as they push for more security and more comprehensive and integrated communications and collaboration platforms,” Aggarwal said