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An Overview of the Enterprise Instant Messaging Market in South Africa
Frost & Sullivan, Aug 2011, Pages: 107
This study provides an opportunity analysis of the South African enterprise instant messaging market. With growing enterprise applications and unified communications solutions, enterprises are seeking cost-effective means for communicating, both internally and externally. The enterprise instant messaging market is driven by the mobile instant messaging, the instant messaging application as a component of unified messaging solutions, and cloud-based instant messaging applications. The demand from medium-sized enterprises is likely to be the future revenue driver for the enterprise instant messaging market in South Africa, due to the increasing awareness of the soft returns on investments and the declining costs of deployment and bandwidth.
Research Overview
This Frost & Sullivan research service titled 'An Overview of the Enterprise Instant Messaging Market' in South Africa provides analyses on industry challenges, market drivers and restraints, revenue and license forecasting and current and future strategies. In this research, Frost & Sullivan's expert analysts thoroughly examine the following: vendors, technologies (standalone instant messaging, instant messaging as a component of a solution, instant messaging gateway, desktop-based instant messaging, device-based instant messaging and Web-based instant messaging) and regulatory analyses. This comprehensive, objective information allows your company to mitigate risk, identify new opportunities, and drive effective strategies for growth.
Market Overview
Enterprise Instant Messaging Applications Emerge as Essential Components of Unified Communication Solutions
The growth of the enterprise instant messaging market in South Africa is being driven by the increasing adoption of unified messaging (including e-mail, instant messaging, fax and voice mail) and unified communications (unified messaging, and conferencing and collaborative applications). However, technology vendors are facing the challenge of low awareness of the soft return on instant messaging applications, limited interoperability of different vendor products as well as limited affordability of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the market. Vendors have developed strategies to offer mobile applications, cloud-based instant messaging and industry-specific solutions to SMEs, which are expected to be the driver of future market growth.
“With booming mobile applications, instant messaging installed on advanced mobile handsets such as Blackberry, iPhone and Tablet is allowing their use as enabling devices for corporate employees to keep in constant communication, whether they are on the move or in the office building,” notes the analyst of this research. “The increased mobility of instant messaging is driving market growth.”
Cloud-based instant messaging services offer SMEs a cost-effective option to use instant messaging applications. Here, the option of monthly rentals rather than the need to purchase the software has supported a lower total cost of ownership. The reduced IT spending is in line with enterprises’ strategic shift from capital expenditure (CAPEX) reduction to operational expenditure (OPEX) reduction.
Multiple Concerns Threaten Market Potential
Lack of awareness about product benefits threatens to dampen market potential. Besides budget constraints, decision makers of SMEs are not yet convinced by the soft return on investments in instant messaging, such as the improvement of productivity and operating efficiency. Limited interoperability of different vendor products also poses a challenge. In comparison to numerous free public applications available in the market with a large customer base, enterprise instant messaging has a very limited interoperability among vendor products and with public instant messaging applications. Hence, it cannot support enterprise communications with external stakeholders; this restrains the service uptake of enterprise instant messaging. “Data security concerns of cloud-based offerings represent another area of concern,” cautions the analyst. “Concerns over data loss and other security issues will potentially limit the uptake of cloud-based enterprise instant messaging services in strictly regulated financial services and health care industries where data protection forms the central nerve of their IT systems.”
With the majority of SMEs using free public applications, instant messaging gateway applications that offer enhanced security of public instant messaging applications and improved interoperability with other publicly available applications need to be offered. “Mobile instant messaging applications on corporate sponsored mobile handsets are expected to drive demand for enterprise instant messaging applications from SMEs as they improve the mobility of the messaging applications,” concludes the analyst.
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