Corporate organizations indicate their top three Messaging and Collaboration priorities are to reduce spam, improve security and to migrate messaging software.

Corporate organizations indicated overwhelmingly that their top three priorities for messaging and collaboration over the next 18 months are to reduce spam, improve security against information leaks and hackers and to migrate/upgrade messaging software. In 2001 and 2002, security issues topped corporate priority lists, but in 2003 these issues have taken a backseat to spam control"-clearly the top messaging priority of todays organizations!

Research and Markets have announced the addition of the "Corporate Messaging Survey, 2003-2005" report to their offering.

Corporate organizations surveyed as part of this study indicated overwhelmingly that their top three priorities for messaging and collaboration over the next 18 months are:

1. Reducing Spam -- 52% of respondents.
2. Improving Security against Information Leaks and Hackers -- 30% of respondents.
3. Migrating/Upgrading Messaging Software -- 28% of respondents.

Messaging priorities have changed drastically over the last three yeas. In 2001 and 2002, security issues topped corporate priority lists, but in 2003 these issues have taken a backseat to spam control"-clearly the top messaging priority of todays organizations!

All the companies we surveyed indicated a healthy level of spending on messaging and collaboration. The average annual messaging operating budget is $1.07 million. This includes all ongoing operational" messaging costs such as maintenance, administration, installation, and training. It does not include the acquisition costs for new software or hardware.

The average annual budget for the acquisition of new messaging software in 2003 is $490,000. This includes acquisition costs for the messaging and collaboration software only, not the hardware.

Overall, we were pleased with these figures, which indicate that spending in messaging and collaboration is still strong, despite a slower economy, as companies continue to invest heavily in mission-critical information sharing infrastructures.

Email traffic and volumes are growing extremely quickly! A typical corporate email user today receives an average of 81 email messages per day and sends 29 per day. This adds up to a total of 110 messages sent/received per day, per user, which represents a growth of 81% over the past year.

- These figures include all messages, spam, bounce backs, etc. On average, in corporate organizations, 24% of incoming email is spam. It is no wonder that the majority of company respondents (86%) are taking measures to combat spam.

This growth of email traffic translates into substantial storage requirement growth as well. The average respondent that we surveyed sends/receives approximately 9.6 MB of email data per business day. This is a whopping 92% growth from 2002.

When we asked companies about their propensity for outsourcing, we found that outsourcing is losing the battle with insourced solutions, even though companies understand the potential cost savings it can bring. The main concerns expressed about outsourcing continue to be security, privacy, and loss of control.

Surprisingly, even after years of attempts to consolidate corporate infrastructure
around a single messaging and collaboration platform, 44% of our respondents indicated that they are still using multiple messaging systems from different vendors.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft Exchange continues to be the primary messaging server, deployed worldwide by over half (51%) of the companies deploying inhouse (i.e. insourced) messaging and collaboration solutions.

We found, however, that IBM Lotus Domino has a much more significant penetration in the European region than MS Exchange.

When we asked about instant messaging (IM), we found that 70% of company respondents are using IM; however, only 26% have actually standardized on a specific, company-wide IM solution.

- Casual intra-company communication continues to be the most common use of IM in the workplace.

In terms of wireless communication, surprisingly only 2.7% of the user population represented in the survey currently has wireless access to their email; however, companies have plans to expand wireless access within the next 18 months. In that timeframe, 9.2% of the survey user population will have wireless access to their email, if current corporate procurement plans go as planned.

Finally, we asked about directories and metadirectories. It turns out that 22% of the companies we surveyed plan on migrating to a new directory product within the next 18 months.

In terms of metadirectories, 26% of the companies surveyed indicated that they are us ing at least one metadirectory product. This is a 7% increase over the results from last years survey.

This report provides detailed results and analysis from a worldwide user survey, broken out by business size and region, including:

1. Messaging Priorities and Procurement Plans -- Top Messaging Priorities among corporate decision makers.
2. Messaging Budgets -- IT Budgets for both ongoing messaging operations and new software acquisition.
3. Messaging Software -- Messaging server software and client software, including eployment by version.
4. Email Traffic -- Traffic and size of email sent today.
5. Unified Messaging -- UM Deployment, Customer Attitudes, Willingness to Pay, and more.
6. Instant Messaging -- IM Deployment, Corporate Policies on IM, Procurement Plans, Willingness to Pay, and more.
7. Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus -- Amount of Spam and Viruses, product deployment and effectiveness.
8. Outsources Messaging -- Deployment, Attitudes, Willingness to Pay, and more.
9. Wireless Email -- Deployment, Devices, Procurement Plans, and more.
10. Directories, Metadirectories, and Provisioning -- Directory and Metadirectory Deployment by segment, along with Market Share, Corporate Procurement Plans, and much more.
11. Historical Data -- Nearly all results are compared with results from 2002 and 2001

For a complete index of this report click on http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/35247

REPORT DATA SUMMARY:
Corporate Messaging Survey, 2003-2005
Number of Pages: 243
Category: Computing & Technology, Telecommunications & Networks
URL: www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/35247

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