New Radicati report on IM market 2005 – 2009

The latest study by The Radicati Group, “Instant Messaging Market, 2005-2009,” provides an in-depth analysis of the worldwide instant messaging market, including installed base, market share, breakouts by region, and analysis of key vendor products and strategies. The study also contains results of a survey of IM use within 523 organizations worldwide.

Use of instant messaging amongst consumer and business users continues to increase, and is expected to drive the instant messaging market from 867 million accounts in 2005, to approximately 1.2 billion accounts in 2009.

The study shows that the majority of IM traffic in 2005 still exists mainly on the public IM networks (12.5 billion IMs sent per day), where the technology first took hold.

The report segments the instant messaging market into: public IM networks, enterprise instant messaging vendors, and IM management vendors.

IM management will become an increasingly integral part of the market, as enterprises that rely on the public IM networks for instant messaging look to IM management vendors for security against the rising onslaught of worms and viruses, as well as for archiving and logging tools for regulatory compliance.