It's official: Instant messaging is the new e-mail for the world's businesses.
According to a new report from analyst house IDC, instant messaging is now a standard piece of the corporate communication toolkit, with about 1 billion IMs sent every day between 28 million enterprise users.
Consequently, the analysts predict, the value of the enterprise IM market will continue to increase for at least the next five years. IDC is now forecasting that the market for business IM--worth $315 million last year--will grow to $736 million in 2009.
Growth in the enterprise segment is all thanks to IM crossover from consumer use to office use, according to the report, with home users of MSN Messenger and the like now ready to turn instant messaging into a business collaboration tool.
Sectors particularly keen to take up enterprise IM include financial services and the public sector, where business IM monitoring and archiving tools play well to industries concerned about financial and workplace compliance.
As the business world can have it's impact on the consumer world, I wonder which form of IM the Businesses are using? the variants of the Open Source XMPP (Jabber) or Simple? MSN? AIM? ICQ? Yahoo? Silc? Groupwise? or Meanwhile/Sametime? It would be nice to see such an overview of the difersified standards!
Web giant is spending $120 million to beef up its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, according to filings with the city reviewed by the San Jose Mercury News.
The Samsung Galaxy Mini 2 S6500 could make its debut at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona later this month, according to a leaked promotional image.
MIT creates a simulation to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Spacewar. A relic of the early days of minicomputers, it was one of the first computer video games and set the stage for many others, including Asteroids.
