Enterprise Messaging market Globally to grow by $70B by 2019

In recent times, there’s been a shift in focus to implementing newer technologies, such as AI and machine learning into enterprise messaging platforms. Platform creators are progressively looking at how they can invest and implement these technologies for business and consumer use.

Definition / Scope
Market Overview
Market Risks
Top Market Opportunities
Market Drivers
Industry Challenges
Technology Trends
Regulatory Trends
Market Size and Forecast
Market Outlook
Competitive Landscape
Competitive Factors
Key Market Players
Strategic Conclusion
References

Definition / Scope

Anyone in today’s fast paced life is directly or indirectly a part of enterprise messaging.

Messaging platforms provide email functionality as well as unified communications (UC), instant messaging (IM), security, email archiving & compliance, social media integration, collaboration tools, conferencing, archiving & retention, along with many more functional features. There has been a growing demand for more advanced communication platform ranging from email to real-time communication.

Most commonly used primary communication hubs, by business and consumer users are Mobile and desktop clients. Thereby, facilitating their wide range of communication necessities which in turn is expected to enhance the messaging platforms market growth.

What can be agreed is the segregation of appropriate market with right set of channels and platforms. The current A2P (Application-to-person) market is particularly focused to reap enterprise level revenues and a big interest for telecom industry.

A latest report suggests this market to grow by $70 billion by 2019, and providing enterprise messaging a medium to increase revenues on the service provider’s side.

Market Overview

The instant messaging market has experienced significant growth over the recent years. China’s WeChat and Japan’s LINE has increased the number of its users up to over 500 million, within two years of their launch. The growth of instant messaging market is directly dependent on users, who have higher disposable income, access to smartphones, and access to 3G/4G services.

The next few years “will mark a golden age for A2P SMS,” with the number of worldwide A2P messages increasing from 1.4 trillion in 2013 to 2.19 trillion by 2018.” SMS then serves as an ideal platform for A2P messaging – another reason why the SMS is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

In the below growth comparison chart for enterprise messaging platforms, we see there has been a significant growth in Asia pacific market with enterprises choosing messaging platforms to retain the customer base, while the US and Europe markets the trend is just vice versa.

Quality of Service, innovation still outcast the enterprise messaging path. More or less from 2014 we observe an overall growth in terms of market size and the enterprise messaging platforms used worldwide.

Market Risks

The shift from traditional business communications to consumer messaging apps opens the door to privacy, compliance and security risks. Any form of business related communication that way leads to possibility of breach of confidential data with hacking, phishing attacks.
Unreliable communication among employees and internal users. In case the medium is not secured the communication would not be reliable enough and can add to breach in security and of data. The communication made should be secured, such that the two parties interacting are ensured there is no breach at the either end.
An inability to effectively engage international customers via mobile technology. The impact of conversation, presentation and queries make it a more two way communication but over mobile technology its difficult to present the same engage with the impact required.
A lack of collaboration with global partners and vendors. Time zone differences, one way communication make it a asynchronous communication. There is a collaboration needed with the discussion happening for a mutual agreement with the best possible outcome, which lacks with the messaging way.

Top Market Opportunities

Global Reach – The best enterprise messaging technologies offer coverage through an extensive network of international providers, enabling mobile messaging and collaboration through a single connection.
Reliability of Service – Downtime isn’t an acceptable risk in enterprise communications. To minimize an organization’s exposure, focus should be on systems with proven performance in Tier-1 networks and a portfolio of successes with similar enterprises around the world.
Scalability – The messaging technology has to be able to grow with the business, allowing to effortlessly add users and expand into new international markets. Top-notch platforms quickly scale SMS, MMS and other features to the organization needs.
Analytics and Reporting – Focus should be on solutions that provide insights about user behaviors, so as to gauge the success of integrated marketing campaigns as well as user interactions.

Market Drivers

Newer technologies for growth – Artificial Intelligence, Augmented and Virtual Reality and IoT

Newer technologies such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality and the Internet of things are the new ways of communication in the workplace. Meetings in a virtual room, AI-enabled data analysis within messaging platforms, bots that do more than send notifications, and IoT-based automatic attendance systems – would be a key driver in terms of growth within this segment.

Customer-centric development

Product development is now shifting towards a customer-led approach, where customer feedback is key to the development of new features. Companies are spending more effort on enabling customer success to retain users. This is a trend that will continue to influence the enterprise messaging space in future.

Third-party integrations

One of the ways enterprise messengers are increasing efficiency is by integrating third-party apps and services within the messaging tool. This saves customers the hassle of switching between multiple apps at work, and gives them time that can be put to better use.

Custom integrations for enterprises are going to be bigger and better in future, giving users more out-of-the-box functionality in their enterprise messaging tools.

Process and workflow automation

Consider the processes we follow for expense reimbursements, or for hiring and induction – there is a certain method to the madness, and these processes often require repetitive human intervention at multiple stages. Process and workflow automation aims to solve the problem of repetitive human effort in such use cases.

Industry Challenges

Volume of data shared through mobile instant apps is quite large. Sharing of data over MIM puts confidentiality to risk, increasing likelihood of data leakage. This may include open wireless network, malware attack, device loss etc.
Absence of security compliance to evaluate office messengers, before they are permitted to be used at enterprise level. This makes the communication more vulnerable to risk of data leaks, phishing attacks, security breaches which at enterprise level would cause sensitive data being shared across.

Technology Trends

Which Chat Tool for What?

Future will see chat apps fall into clear categories and serve very specific needs and use cases. Some will focus on cloud-based team and SME communications, some will focus on large corporations, some on private cloud and on premise deployments, some will focus on inter-company and intra-company communication, some will be all about features, some about security etc.

In other words, categories will become clearer and help end-users make informed decisions as what tool suits their needs.

Stepping up Security

After a string of prominent data breaches, future will see even more scrutiny and vetting via corporate IT departments. Encryption and authentication technology will be expected as will flexible deployment methods. More advanced security measures such as MDM/EMM support will become a more mainstream requirement.

The CCO – Chat Ownership

Chat ownership is no easy feat. Chat isn’t a tool that is self-contained within one department – it crosses boundaries/teams/geographies/use cases. A customer relationship ownership means answering all customer queries with the use of Artificial Intelligence and a repository of possible answers. Still much to be explored in this area to differentiate in terms of quality of service.

Bots – It’s all about Connections

ChatBots are a computerized response to something said or requested in messaging channels or the like. The idea is to create a seamless experience for users, who can access services (apps, systems, tools) directly via a messaging app by chatting with a “bot” who pulls in information.

The platforms would be driven with more predictive and responsive technology with capturing customers data and possible queries and would be ready with all possible solutions required. Its more of a proactive care for the customers to resolve all possible set of queries.

Rise of the Eco-System

Things like Voice capabilities will be added in future trends. Maybe even video calling. And that will build a knowledge network of people and data that goes beyond the written world.

Chat as a Content Aggregation

With the number of dispersed chat systems in use, firms might create knowledge silos instead of actually opening up collaboration and data.

Regulatory Trends

The push away from traditional marketing channels is being spearheaded by increased regulations, a changing product landscape, and the desire for monetization.

In the regulatory space, regulations like CAN-SPAM (Canadian Anti-Spam Law) and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) have tightened the belt on email and data practices with consumer consent needed before the messaging can be sent and not considered as spamming and also any data shared is secured and in case misused would come under law but still the same marketers, salespeople and even bots continue to abuse these channels.

Market Size and Forecast

The below graph on global revenues generated from enterprise SMS channels worldwide shows an interesting analysis that the trend for SMS based channel seem to decrease across the world as more enhanced and analytics based platforms have entered the market, still the traditional SMS method is still existent and across all the regions.

The future seems more promising as enterprise messaging is still in its growth path and would likely be more analytics based with Artificial Intelligence and proactive care techniques refining the platforms.

The other graph on market size trends worldwide on the enterprise messaging applications shows the growth at a CAGR 16% and reaching 6 Billion USD by the year 2023. As per the trends there is a continuous growth in the enterprise messaging market with more and more competitors fighting for the customer base and reaching them in out of the box way.

Market Outlook

Built-in artificial intelligence capabilities

AI can address many productivity pain points. Most notably it can be applied to the amount of time workers must dedicate each day to the “orchestration” of work, rather than to work itself. A messaging-based collaboration app with built-in AI can dramatically reduce the productivity time.

Evolution to virtual workspaces

Team collaboration applications must continue to evolve when it comes to eliminating or decreasing time-wasting activities. For this reason, virtual workspaces are core to the future of team collaboration.

Telephony and UC integration a must

While most team collaboration apps support some form of video conferencing, few offer outbound voice calling to the telephony network. And when they do, these capabilities are not really integrated into the work-stream.

Task Management for simplified workflow

Team collaboration is, by nature, all about getting work done. And getting work done is all about people, assignments and tasks. Yet many enterprise messaging apps talk about their use as a collaboration tool solely on the basis of bringing people together in a chat.

Competitive Landscape

There are a lot of new companies trying to do something ‘in messaging,’ so it’s worth trying to create a map of the different participants:

Channels: Messaging apps and their APIs such as services from WeChat, Line APIs, Twitter, Telegram trying to capture the existing enterprise messaging market.
New B2C ‘Assistant for X’ companies: New businesses getting started as assistants such as services from Zoho, Flock with multiple platforms combined an as suited for an organisation needs.
Existing B2C companies that should utilize messaging such as the Telecom Service providers, Small and Medium business organisations, etc
Infrastructure companies being built to enable (2) and (3) such as the network service providers and the custom application development organisations.

Competitive Factors

Transport encryption with SSL/TLS is a basic requirement (that even many websites do nowadays) and does not make a vendor a “military-grade messaging app”. A secure messenger for enterprises should have several additional layers of encryption.
A nice messaging app is a good start but is does not qualify as a “leading enterprise messaging app”, if it does not work across platforms or has limited digital content sharing.
A “highly-secure messenger for businesses” stores everything in clear on the server instead of anonymizing user data. Besides multi-tenancy normally means clearly separating and protecting tenant data, and not mixing up the data of all tenants on the server.
In order to manage users, an enterprise messaging app should not require to hard-code everything via a terminal interface. There should be a professional, easy to use and comprehensive administrator portal.
A “leading team communication app” should be highly scalable and not get performance issues, when there are more than 500 employees using the app.
It is hard to believe that a vendor offers the “leading messenger for enterprises”, if there aren’t any good references available for the product.

Key Market Players

The below graph shows the key market players in the enterprise messaging path for both regular usage by the consumers and also the single dedicated usage of applications on the consumer front.

This gives an idea of what all key players are having what customer base at present. We see whatsapp and facebook messenger still rule the market and all social advertising still is mostly preferred with the use of them. The new entrants such as telegram and periscope still need to catch up on the trend but for sure there is much more to be unrevealed within this market in future.

Strategic Conclusion

In conclusion, the possibilities business SMS messaging provides enable endless opportunities to power mobile engagement connecting enterprises with their audiences and 360 Dialog specializes exactly in that.

The more the injection of analytics and intelligent responses with the use of Artificial Intelligence is involved, the better we see the consumer responses and interests in nearby future.

Still a lot is on the enterprise messaging way ahead for the companies worldwide though traditional SMS way should also see improvement and proactive care based approach to prevent this method dying out completely in future and impacting the telecom service provider revenues.