* Two important trends in the messaging market
Even a casual observer of the messaging market over the past couple of years would take notice of two very important trends.
Even a casual observer of the messaging market over the past couple of years would take notice of two very important trends.
First, the trend toward unified communications, in which multiple messaging tools – e-mail, instant messaging, voice, fax, Web conferencing and other capabilities – are being brought together in a unified system. These systems make users more productive, IT administrators more efficient and organizations more flexible.
Second, unifying communications is taking place on a broader scale, as well. Over the past several years there have been a large number of acquisitions in the messaging space: Microsoft purchased FrontBridge; Symantec purchased Veritas, which had previously purchased KVS; Cisco purchased IronPort; Secure Computing purchased CipherTrust; and EMC purchased Legato. Those are just a very few of the many acquisitions that have taken place in the messaging space. In short, lots of different types of messaging functionality are becoming unified under a single vendor’s umbrella.
I believe that these changes are not driving change in the messaging space, but instead are the result of it. Our research has found that a significant majority of messaging decision-makers want to take advantage of the benefits of a ‘one-stop shop’ approach to messaging management.
Given that in order to manage messaging effectively an organization must manage antivirus, antispam, antiphishing, antispyware, outbound content scanning, archiving, encryption and a host of other capabilities – not to mention voice services, fax services and Web conferencing – it simply makes sense to try and consolidate these capabilities across a smaller set of vendors. Managing eight or 10 different vendors’ offerings, each of which has different upgrade cycles and potential incompatibilities is difficult — having fewer vendors makes like easier. Vendors have recognized this trend and are buying up companies in order to expand the breadth of their capabilities and become one-stop shops; a trend that is being mirrored by hosted messaging service vendors, as well.
The bottom line is that messaging functionality is rapidly becoming unified, even if unified messaging is slower to be adopted.
