Businesses sending one billion IMs per day

Instant messaging is the new email for the world's businesses - it's official.

According to a new report from analyst house IDC, IM is now a standard piece of the corporate communication toolkit, with around one billion IMs sent every day between 28 million enterprise users.

Consequently, the analysts are predicting that the value of the enterprise IM market will continue to increase for at least the next five years. IDC is now forecasting that the market for business IM - worth $315m last year - will grow to $736m in 2009.

Growth in the enterprise segment is all thanks to IM crossover, according to the report, with homes users of MSN Messenger and the like now keen to turn instant messaging into a business collaboration tool.

Sectors particularly keen to take up enterprise IM include financial services and the public sector, where business IM's monitoring and archiving tools play well to industries concerned about compliance.