Enterprise email marketing infrastructure specialist provider Sendmail last week released its predictions regarding enterprise email (marketing).
The company sees five important trends but starts by stating that email is not dead, as we did so many times before.
Sendmail: “despite claims that social networks are dominating person-to-person communications, enterprise email continues to remain a business-critical capability, and the dominate messaging tool used by enterprises throughout the world for secure, business communications”.
Sendmail refers to the recent study conducted by Osterman Research which found that “email is considered important by 97.6% of individuals in larger organizations in the course of doing their work, and 99.2% anticipate email will be this important to them in 2010.”
The Osterman Research report also shows ‘that 45% of individuals in the workplace report that their email use is greater now than it was a year ago.”
In 2010, Sendmail predicts the following trends will be realized (remember that Sendmail is specialized in secured enterprise messaging infrastructure solutions).
Stronger demand for data loss prevention
Sendmail claims that with much of the new privacy regulations coming into effect throughout Europe, the company sees a stronger demand for data loss prevention continuing through 2010 as many organizations further develop their DLP strategy and solution architecture to increase security.
Increased demand for cloud services
Next year will continue to show trends of IT cost reductions, which will, among other things, drive increased demand for cloud services, according to Sendmail: “as cloud providers continue to invest in security and provide additional services such as private clouds, adoption of cloud services will start to increase among the large enterprise market”.
Outbound bulk email delivery for email marketing campaigns
Sendmail states that another byproduct of the above mentioned cost reductions was a trend toward bringing certain email services in-house, such as bulk email delivery used for email marketing campaigns, customer communications, statement/billing delivery and more. Solutions and messaging platforms that can offer this as an add-on application for organizations to leverage their existing infrastructure and investment will be best positioned to meet the goals and requirements here, Sendmail says.
Virtualization
Sendmail found that the adoption of virtualization has grown significantly in 2009, and will continue through 2010. “Failover/Disaster-Recovery and server consolidation continue to drive the need, while improvements to security and operational aspects within virtualizations have removed many of the previous hurdles”.
Encryption
Again driven by regulatory requirements and stronger corporate security policies, Sendmail claims that “the need to provide confidentiality of sensitive information being exchanged even between authorized parties is increasing, and driving demand for secure messaging solutions”. According to the company “offering an automated policy-driven architecture to enforce encryption based on security policy will prove to be the critical element in this solution, where organizations are looking to reduce the dependence on the end-user for determining what should be encrypted”.
Email and enterprise communications, marketing and CRM
Finally, we quote CEO Donald Massaro about the so often announced death of email: “While the recent rise in alternative communication methods and social networking services like Facebook and Twitter are indeed changing the way people communicate, virtually”.
However, this does not mean that email is dead at all and Massaro doesn’t only think from an email marketing perspective but from an enterprise perspective including how email is used in daily business processes and CRM, for example.
Massaro: “enterprise email today is deeply woven into the standard business infrastructure, and used countless times a day to carry out all aspects of business operations. Above and beyond personal communications between employees, enterprise email today is used ‘behind the scenes’ for everything from business processes, billing and statement delivery to CRM, marketing and other important ERP functions. Given the prevalence of email today and the important function it serves in daily business operations, its proliferation in the enterprise will surely continue.”
What can we add to that?
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