What lies ahead for messaging?

From...

By Cynthia Morgan

(IDG) -- Few doubt that e-mail has transformed business during its 30-year history -- and that transformation is continuing.

New messaging technologies, and the problems they bring, will likely have an equally significant impact on the way businesses work in the future.

Over the next few years, messaging systems will embrace real-time operation in addition to the traditional store-and-forward model and will be woven into virtually every major application that businesses use. These systems will increasingly incorporate other forms of communication, such as mobile-wireless systems, telephony, fax, speech recognition and "rich media." And messaging managers will face one of the most critical issues in IT today: how to capture, save and mine the rich information stores these systems accumulate over the years.

New types of messages will add to already-overloaded message storage systems, causing problems for IT managers, experts say.

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"People are using their in-boxes not only for messaging, but also for file storage," said Andre Cyr, senior systems administrator at Bowman Capital in San Mateo, California. "It's not unusual for our analysts to save four gigabytes, more than 100,000 messages, in a year."

Most companies "are still trying to solve the message storage problem by using bigger servers or limiting the size of employee mailboxes. Ultimately, this is a strategy that will fail," said Sara Radicati, CEO of The Radicati Group, a consulting and research firm based in Palo Alto, California.

Existing messaging platforms can efficiently store and retrieve about a year's worth of messages. But an organization must generally handle five to seven years of business-critical messages. Products that can handle the archiving and fast search-and-retrieval of such massive stockpiles of information, including Enterprise Vault from KVS in New York, will grow rapidly in popularity, Radicati predicted.

"We're using the Vault archiving system to siphon off messages older than one year," said Cyr. "(A user) can ask for every e-mail that uses the ticker symbol MSFT in a given period and retrieve all those messages within 10 seconds instead of the 20 to 30 minutes it would take from Outlook."

Instant response is becoming increasingly important for big companies. "Real-time collaboration is the hot button of the future. It's being built into sales force automation tools, (customer relationship management and) accounting," said Robert Mahowald, an analyst at IDC in Framingham, Massachusetts.

Instant messaging's enormous popularity has helped it make its way into organizations well before its formal acceptance by IT departments.

"Employees are building what's almost a parallel collaborative universe, one that right now, the IT department has very little control over. When they start downloading business documents and reaching business decisions through IM, they're sending that valuable information out of the enterprise," Mahowald warned. "IT managers are right to scream about it, but they need to take control."

Hewitt Associates, a human resources consulting firm in Lincolnshire, Illinois, rolled out Lotus Software Group's Sametime real-time collaboration service to about 14,000 seats this summer, said technical architect Ryan Mitchell. "We found usage exploded," he said. "We have specifically turned off the capability to connect to (America Online's Instant Messenger, so we keep it in the company -- for now."

American Online is a sister AOL Time Warner company with CNN.com.

Increasingly, said Radicati, large organizations are thinking about adopting unified messaging systems that integrate many technologies, including instant messaging, into a single user mailbox. "The convergence of e-mail, voice mail, mobile messaging, fax and rich media will be key in the next few years," she said.

Corporations that adopt unified messaging systems will almost certainly change as a result, Radicati added. "Gathering all these technologies into a single solution will force IT departments to evolve, to take responsibilities for telephony, Webcasting, rich media and other services that are generally considered non-IT. It could have broader political implications for the entire company."

Unified messaging systems will become more important as the number of telecommuters grows. In a recent survey of 1,953 IT workers by Bloomington, Minnesota-based Techies.com, 48 percent of the respondents said they telecommute at least part time. And according to Radicati, the growing number of mobile workers will strongly influence the need to combine all communications into a single resource.

"Everyone wants a single location to do all their work, and we were considering unifying voice mail and e-mail next year," said Cyr. "But we can't -- it would only contribute to the storage problem we're already having."