Big organizations are more mobility-oriented

Although the majority of organizations have yet to integrate their messaging infrastructure with mobile messaging capabilities, large organizations have done so to a much greater extent than smaller ones.

More than twice as many large organizations (with more than 1,000 e-mail users) have already integrated their messaging infrastructure with RIM Blackberry devices, SMS and messaging kiosks. Plus, larger organizations have substantially more messaging integration with PDAs and smart phones, compared to smaller organizations.

A large part of the reason for the greater integration of mobile capabilities with traditional messaging infrastructure is due simply to economies of scale in larger organizations. A company with 10,000 messaging seats is typically going to be better able to support 100 executives using Blackberry devices than a company with 100 messaging seats supporting a single Blackberry user. Also, large organizations tend to have more mobile and geographically distributed users than smaller organizations and therefore more need for mobile communications technologies.

That said, not all large organizations are even considering integrating messaging with mobile technologies. For example, one of our survey respondents in a company with more than 20,000 e-mail users indicated that at his company wireless messaging is only at the proof-of-concept stage. Security and the ability to track messages are concerns. The company has stopped supporting Palm devices, and “iPAQs are a ‘best effort,’ non-supported environment, so e-mail never makes it there unless the client figures it out for themselves.”

Clearly, although mobile messaging technologies are increasingly used in the enterprise, particularly in large organizations, they still have a long way to go before being as common as traditional messaging.