As a new generation enters the workforce, email will lose a great deal
in terms of usage and significance and will be replaced by IM, with the
latter becoming the preferred mode of business interaction.
According to Vibhu Ranjan, Director, Unified Communications Group,
Microsoft, IM is already gaining ground. "Within Microsoft, we are
communicating with our co-workers more and more on IMs. I feel that a
conversation over the internal messenger saves time and at least 4-5
emails."
Ranjan presents us with a real world scenario to substantiate his point.
"This morning, one of our sales people was at the customer's end and the
latter requested for a couple of case studies from our sales
representative. Typically, my colleague would have messaged me but he
immediately initiated an IM session with me on our enterprise messenger
through his laptop and i was able to send those files to him with no time
lost."
The advantage that enterprise models of internal messengers offer is
multiple integration across communication platforms, instantaneity,
presence and most importantly a secure network. According to Chandru
Kavichandran, Business Manager, Converged Communication, IBM, enterprise
internal messengers like Lotus Same time will become more and more popular.
"With these solutions employees will be in a position to discover what
communication platforms their "buddies" alias co-workers have access to at
any given point in time. This will make communication a lot more effective
and responsive. Besides that, there are the benefits of solutions like the
Lotus Suite like directory look up, phone status, phone control, click to
call, click to conference etc."
The most important aspect of this communication is that it is conducted
over secure networks. Enterprise IM conversations can be documented and
saved. They can also be used to initiate and document multiparty AV
meetings.
Minhaj Zia is optimistic about the fate of IMs visa a vis emails because
IMs were first launched in the consumer space and it's only now that it has
come to the enterprise segment. "IMs are gaining ground because of consumer
demand. Youngsters use social media and more conversational formats of
communica¬tion like blogs, wikis and IMs. And UC itself is driven by
consumer demand."
So what role will email play in times to come? Kavichandran believes that
IMs will surpass emails in terms of usage. Emails will be used for strong
information archival over a long period of time. So you would not want to
communicate about the company's financials over IMs. "However, the
conversations about mundane activities will move over to IMs. |
