Worldwide messaging applications license and maintenance revenue topped $1.14 billion in 2002. This slight decline from 2001 (-1%) belies a good news/bad news story: On the downside, were it not for an IDC revenue accounting change, messaging applications revenue would have declined 2.5% in 2002. The good news is that the decline was partly the result of broad economic forces outside the messaging applications market, and there are remedies close at hand to get the overall market back on track.
Looking forward, success in 2H03 and beyond will depend on whether vendors and customers can: Convince buyers - enterprises, carriers, and large service providers - to look beyond today's tactical spending environments to think strategically about the role messaging applications (especially unified messaging [UM], EIM, and the new breed of deskless worker email) will play in their future.
Find an increased role for real-time IP products like enterprise-based UM, unified communications (UC), and EIM alongside and atop real-time presence-based platforms like Microsoft's Office Live Communications server; such real-time platforms deliver a version of converged networks to enterprise customers hungry for cost reductions and greater productivity, but also threaten to steal the thunder of communications applications and IP infrastructure vendors like Cisco, Avaya, and Nortel that have been marketing the "IP vision" for years.
Capitalize on the strong market demand for new email-centric products and functionality such as antispam, content filtering, antivirus, disaster recovery, business continuity, regulatory compliance, analytics, remote monitoring, and mobility in order to extend revenue from maintenance and upgrades in this mature market.
Build and improve products with multilanguage support and interfaces and cultivate integrator and service provider channels in Western Europe, Asia/Pacific, and Latin America to break into new markets hungry for rich messaging applications.
Learn from the lessons illuminated by the rapid adoption and maturation of SMS in Europe and benefit from the fact that SMS's shortcomings (no ability to carry presence information, complicated billing, etc.) will create a strong demand for "leading-edge" nonvoice applications (instant messaging, etc.) that in turn drive the adoption of other nonvoice wireless services (wireless Internet, etc.), particularly in the consumer market.
IDC had anticipated 2002 messaging application market revenue would grow by more than 20% from its 2001 high water mark of $1.14 billion. But in late spring 2003, as vendors completed their reporting for fiscal 2002, it became clear that for several reasons - carriers' sluggish spending on messaging applications and services-creation platforms and a slower-than-anticipated transition from new spending on ICE applications to lower-cost standalone email applications, among others - messaging market revenue had remained essentially flat in 2002.
Factors contributing to the market performance include:
Vendors (chiefly Openwave, but also Comverse and Sun) saw a dramatic pullback in the spending by carriers and very large service providers for unified messaging, standalone email, MMS, and services-creation platforms; in many cases, seat capacity was purchased, but was not sold to end users, and plans for upgrades (from voicemail to unified messaging, for example) did not occur.
Enterprise instant messaging activity, buoyed by the late-2002 announcements of business products by potential market champions AOL, Yahoo!, and Microsoft, produced great interest (but very little revenue) as early alliances and sales were delayed until spring 2003.
Microsoft's Office Live Communications Server (ne RTC, ne Greenwich) played a similar role in building a buzz about the value of enterprise presence networks and instant messaging, but delays in the release (October 2003 is the current plan) meant that Microsoft spent more time spinning and less time selling this important new product/paradigm.
Unified messaging products aimed at enterprises (UM/E) sold moderately well as vendors rebuilt the messaging around their products, moving away from a long tradition of characterizing their value as in "productivity" and instead underscoring server replacement and business value (i.e., "sales forces can be more responsive and sell more products") arguments.
Standalone email applications aimed at "deskless" workers sold briskly, but only into pockets of workers who would not otherwise have access to email; vendors did not aggressively tap into spending earmarked for ICE (aka groupware) server replacement and consolidation on these lower-cost applications.
Antispam and SMTP messaging security products sold particularly well, but these products have a low cost/seat and were often OEMed and so did not generate much revenue for messaging vendors; potential spending was further dampened by the fact that email customers increasingly expected - and vendors like Sendmail, Ispwitch, Microsoft, and IBM have delivered - better antivirus, antispam, and server management capability, so that less money overall was spent for third-party messaging security products in 2002.
"Messaging applications are mainstays of business collaboration, and to extend their use, businesses will need to be more strategic in their thinking about how older technology, like email, can be updated to meet new needs, like regulatory compliance, and how newer products, like enterprise IM and unified messaging, can make information workers more productive. Messaging vendors need to roll up their sleeves to convince buyers that the aging email system simply cannot be patched any longer and that collaboration products have gotten better to the point that now it is safe to wade back into the water and spend some money for the future." - Robert P. Mahowald, research manager, Collaborative Computing, IDC
Weitere Informationen zu dieser Studie (Inhaltsverzeichnis, Preis etc.) erhalten CIO Leser bei Katja Schmalen, Marketing Manager, unter 069/90502-115 oder kschmalen@idc.com .