Hip And Cool Means Growth, And More Security Concerns

A little while back I blogged about how messaging technologies have become "cool" and are enjoying "hip" status among those that define "hip" standards for our society, the youth and young adult markets. Well, I'm thinking the vendor and service provider communities are finding this all pretty cool, as well. The Radicati Group Inc., in a series of recent reports, projects some pretty heady growth for messaging-related products and it's not all coming from messaging security.

For instance, the e-mail client installed base will increase, according to the market watcher, from about 1.9 billion seats in 2006 to nearly 3.6 billion seats in 2010, representing an average annual growth rate of 18 percent. Now, Radicati didn't say how many of those mail clients will be desktop clients and how many will be mobile, but based on the hip, trend-setting youth and young adult thumb-typing set, I would assume a growing percentage of that installed base becomes more mobile.

And how important is this group? Radicati reports that people under the age of 29 will account for 44 percent of worldwide e-mail users in 2006. And worldwide, the importance of the North America market begins to decrease as messaging technologies take hold in Asia/Pacific and the rest of the world. North America currently accounts for 22 percent of the global e-mail user population, according to Radicati, which projects that percentage to decrease to 18 percent by 2009.On the corporate side, messaging vendors are continuing to broaden their focus to include small- to medium-sized businesses, and for good reason; here in North America, SMBs now account for 35 percent of the corporate e-mail installed base, with 154 million mailboxes, Radicati reports.

Collaboration suites are not projected to see similar growth in the enterprise space. The market will grow from $1.6 billion in 2006, to $2.3 billion in 2010, an average annual growth rate of about 10 percent, according to analyst.

But an interesting trend on the corporate side is the growing use off webmail. While security and compliance concerns still make IT managers cringe at the thought of webmail, it is nearly impossible to deny its use with the growth of mobile and teleworkers. Radicati projects the corporate webmail installed base will increase from 170 million seats in 2006, to 335 million seats in 2010.

Now, I can't mention that without also mentioning that the analyst expects corporate spam traffic to nearly double from 44 billion messages per day in 2006 to 83 billion messages per day in 2009. Ditto for consumer spam traffic, expected to rise from 72 billion messages per day in 2006 to 145 billion messages per day in 2009. Anyone want to rethink those webmail clients?