The Enterprise Mobile Messaging Benchmark Report

Key Business Value Findings
- Enterprises are moving beyond e-mail for enterprise mobile messaging – 68% of organizations surveyed have two or more mobile messaging applications in place and 30% have three or more;
- Security is overall, the biggest challenge to the mass adoption of mobile messaging solutions;
- 67% of Best-in-Class organizations have an infrastructure in place that can support a platform that unifies all mobile messaging applications;
- Best-in-Class organizations are four times more likely than the industry average to understand the benefits of unified mobile messaging solutions.

Implications & Analysis
- 80% of Best-in-Class organizations are using enterprise mobile messaging solutions to interact with and develop closer ties with their customers;
- Best-in-Class organizations are using mobile messaging more in Customer Service and Sales departments than in the IT Department, while laggards still use messaging mostly in the IT department;
- 55% of organizations see security as the top challenge for deploying mobile messaging solutions, but only 30% are taking action to address that challenge.

Recommendations for Action
- Define business metrics such as time savings or increased customer responsiveness to determine the value of mobile messaging projects;
- Develop a centralized system for managing mobile messaging solutions;
- Improve communication across divisions about the needs for mobile messaging to ensure that the proper solutions are deployed in the appropriate departments;
- Integrate mobile messaging solutions with back-end hardware and software solutions to streamline the IT department’s management of those solutions.

 Today’s enterprises are starting to understand that doing faster, more efficient and more effective work requires faster, more efficient, and more effective communication systems. The ability to: 1) satisfy customer needs anytime, anywhere; 2) create flexible organizations that are able to react more quickly to environmental changes; and 3) enable employees to collaborate in the most effective way are prerequisites for success in the modern business world. Organizations that are deploying mobile messaging solutions find it an invaluable tool to address these issues. (Figure 1).
The continuously falling cost, increasing availability and improved performance of mobile networks and devices is driving the proliferation of mobile messaging applications, including push-email, mobile instant messaging (IM), Short Message Services, Multimedia Services, and voice over IP (VoIP) solutions. Organizations are now assessing how these various mobile messaging solutions – beyond push email - can actually help improve workflows within their organizations, with the ultimate expectation of having all these communication options available to them on one device.
To that end, Aberdeen’s research shows that 51% of the organizations had implemented at least one mobile messaging solution within the last 12 months. It’s not surprising to see in Figure 2 that mobile email solutions were the most prevalent in organizations due to the popularity of those solutions.

The Emergence of Mobile Messaging
Respondents to Aberdeen’s survey have shown that mobile messaging is still a relatively new concept within their organizations. Forty-eight percent of the organizations surveyed stated that they have had mobile email in place for more than a year. This statistic suggests that enterprise mobile messaging is now coming out of the “early adopter” stage and is starting to see mass enterprise adoption.
Aberdeen’s research also shows an increase in the number of organizations that are leveraging mobile messaging solutions other than mobile email. Sixty-eight percent of organizations surveyed are currently deploying two or more mobile messaging solutions and 30% are leveraging three or more mobile messaging solutions.
Survey respondents also provided insight into what mobile messaging technologies they planned on investing in over the next 12 months. The fact that organizations stated most frequently that they planned on investing in Mobile VoIP speaks to the continued convergence of voice and data networks and the evolutionary transition from wired IP telephony to mobile IP telephony.
Forty-one percent of survey respondents indicated that interoperability and compatibility with existing solutions and devices is a major challenge in adopting new messaging solutions. Sixty-seven percent of Best-in-Class organizations are addressing this issue by implementing an infrastructure that can support unifying all mobile messaging applications.
Best-in-Class organizations are unifying these applications into one integrated mobile messaging solution and see that as an effective way to address not only the above issues, but also the increasing cost of managing disparate mobile messaging platforms and applications within their organizations.