Real-time messaging is displacing email

According to a new report, 56 percent of respondents believe that real-time messaging will displace email as their organization's primary workplace communication and collaboration tool.

The latest Trends in Cloud IT Research survey from BetterCloud surveyed over 800 people split between IT professionals and end users. The results show that while real-time messaging is gaining popularity, 27 percent of end users and 23 percent of IT professionals say some employees are less productive because of it.

The other side of that coin is that 80 percent of Skype for Business users, 84 percent of Google Hangouts users, and 95 percent of Slack users say their communication has improved because of real-time messaging.

Small and medium businesses are most likely to use the 'big three' messaging apps -- Google Hangouts, Skype for Business and Slack -- with Slack in particular having 92 percent SMB users. A majority of organizations (57 percent), however, use two or more real-time messaging applications. Bigger businesses are likely to use even more, over 20 percent of large enterprises (5,001+ employees) use five or more real-time messaging apps.

It seems that the telephone is under threat from this trend towards messaging too, 71 percent of small-to-medium sized businesses (1-1,000 employees) say they will not invest in another phone system at all or will not increase their investment.

The trend towards messaging is also partly driven by shadow IT. Nearly a quarter of respondents (22 percent) admit they either don’t know or don't care whether the real-time messaging application they use is approved by their IT department. Seven percent say they aren’t sure if the tool they use is outside IT’s control.

You can find more in the full report which is available via the BetterCloud blog.

Photo credit: Pavel Ignatov/ Shutterstock