Desktop messaging is currently generating revenues of $5,000m for suppliers of products and services in Europe and North America, according to new report from London-based Ovum Ltd. Desktop Messaging: Strategies For The Corporate Market, which costs $1,800, indicates that many large companies expect to provide access to messaging services for up to 80% of their staff within the next five years. Currently office automation-based electronic mail dominates the market, but a new generation of messaging servers will begin to take the lead within the next two years as messaging is rearchitected in client-server environments. Facsimile transmission software will grow rapidly in the short run, but will decline as messaging servers provide integrated messaging capabilities. The services market consists of mailbox services for storing and delivering messages; message-transfer services for providing wide-area communications between corporate messaging systems, including X.400, TCP/IP; and proprietary gateways. Single-terminal mailbox services currently constitute an estimated 77% of the services market, according to Ovum. By the end of the decade, however, messaging services revenues will be concentrated in the gateways connecting corporate messaging systems. Gateways into the Internet will constitute 39% of the market, while gateways to X.400 and proprietary systems will each have around 17% share. As messaging becomes widespread in user organisations, the need to connect corporate messaging systems across the wide area network, both within and between companies, will become urgent. Thus while messaging services currently constitute only 18% of the market, by the year 2000, they will come to represent 44% of the $12,500m messaging market, the researchers reckon.
