The corporate IM market has long looked promising, but to date IM remains dominated by consumer applications from AOL, MSN, and Yahoo, not to mention nascent efforts by Google and Apple's iChat. IBM Lotus and Microsoft dominate enterprise IM, and Jabber deserves mention as well. According to The Radicati Group, Inc., a messaging market research firm, there were 816 million consumer IM accounts worldwide on the public networks and 51 million enterprise IM accounts on corporate systems at the end of 2005.
But many of those using the consumer IM networks are doing business, which has given rise to companies like Akonix, FaceTime, and IMlogic (now part of Symantec), which address corporate concerns about IM like administrative control, auditing, and security.
The Radicati Group estimates that there are 135 million businesses IM users, a number it projects will reach 477 million by 2009. Many of these work with consumer IM clients that lack corporate security features.
"We've really hit an inflection point where people have brought instant messaging into the workplace and it now has become a business critical tool that people use every day to get their jobs done," says David Knight, VP of product management at WebEx. "The vast majority of this growth is being fueled actually by the consumer networks. The end-users have really voted with their feet, or fingertips. …The growth of the business use of these consumer products has been quite phenomenal."
The new service will be called AIM Pro and will be based on the consumer-oriented AIM service. It will come in two flavors: a professional edition for individual users and SMBs, and an enterprise edition (EIM) with administrative controls specifically designed for large companies. The service will feature online conferencing, collaboration, desktop sharing, and assorted multimedia services.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
