By Radicati Team • Jan 5th, 2009 • Category: Blog
http://www.radicati.com/?p=2425

Needless to say 2009, heralds in a new era of spending caution and investment nervousness against the backdrop of a tumbling worldwide economy. Still, most people we speak to in the messaging and collaboration industry are optimistic and overall believe that the need for solid IT solutions will continue to drive our industry forward even in a recession.

We expect that most IT organizations will be focused on cutting staff and capital costs in 2009. However, this also means organizations will look to do more with technology – technologies that are perceived to help reduce costs or improve efficiency will see a major uptake in 2009.

We believe the winners in 2009 will be in the following areas:

• Hosted Services (SaaS) – lots has been said in the past couple of years about SaaS and its potential to “take over the world”, but in truth uptake has been slow mainly due to customer skepticism about security and privacy (some of this we know to be perception rather than reality, and is highly unjustified). We believe 2009 will be the year that will see the most aggressive growth in SaaS deployments by organizations of all sizes, and not just from SMBs as was generally forecast.
• Email Security Appliances for companies of all sizes - the email security appliance market is relatively new. It has experienced the biggest spike in demand over the past two years, and we expect it to grow fast in 2009, at a rate of about 60%. Appliances are becoming increasingly popular as organizations look for an easily deployed and managed solution that does not require significant IT time and resources to install.
• Financially Justifiable Archiving, eDiscovery and DLP Solutions – due to shrinking budgets, we don’t expect most companies to spend lavishly on advanced eDiscovery and compliance solutions in 2009. Instead, more companies will be looking for simplified versions of typical compliance solutions. The same concept will be applied to archiving solutions – those companies that have already planned on buying a solution in 2009 will probably stick to the plan, but go with a basic version. Most organizations that planned to upgrade to a more sophisticated archiving solution, will probably stay with their current solution for another year or so.

Overall, we think 2009 will be a year of interesting transitions for our industry and we are confident that the result will be positive for customers.