The rise of enterprise messaging has been sudden, disruptive and profound. IDC estimates that the global market for enterprise collaboration tools will reach $3.2 billion by 2021. And according to Gartner, by 2022, 70% of teams will rely on collaboration tools as the primary means of communicating, coordinating, and sharing information.
With all this rapid change, we at Symphony wanted to take a step back and understand how both users and IT executives were looking at the implementation, usage and adoption of these tools. To better understand the attitudes of each group, we conducted a survey with 150 executives who are responsible for adopting and deploying team collaboration applications for their companies, and 150 “in the trenches” workers who use collaboration tools frequently at their jobs.
What we found, overwhelmingly, is that the results point to continued success, innovation and adoption within this space. For instance:
Users and executives alike agree that team collaboration apps have made them or their teams more productive and efficient:
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Users report that collaboration tools have reduced their use of email and accelerate their response time:
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Of note, the security of these platforms was one of the main points of disagreement between the executives and end-users we surveyed. As the market continues to grow and collaboration tools become more prevalent, we expect to see CIOs, CSOs and IT executives more critically evaluate which collaboration tool to adopt.
Employees’ attitudes toward security are wildly inconsistent with IT executives’ views on security:
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We’re also excited to see how users and IT teams will work together to introduce more integrations and automation into collaboration platforms as the space matures.
Executives want to see more capabilities in their collaboration tools like chatbots and workflow integrations, and plan to invest in these:
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Ultimately, the enterprise messaging and collaboration is still young, still growing and still changing. As our CXO, Jonathan Christensen wrote earlier in this blog:
“The team collaboration market is booming and will undoubtedly be one of this years’ most exciting to watch. As more companies realize the value of deploying team collaboration software, a surge of new startups will be inspired and major market events (for instance, Slack’s recent IPO announcement) will become increasingly common. New ground will be broken, with collaboration tools providing greater efficiencies and organization to users, but new threats will emerge, too.”
Quantum computing is evolving from a theoretical concept into an emerging capability and the cybersecurity implications are significant. While quantum machines offer incredible potential for industries like finance and drug discovery, they also threaten the cryptographic standards that secure global digital infrastructure.
MUFG Bank has launched a full-scale initiative to transform client communication in its wealth management business for high-net-worth clients. By adopting the technology of Symphony, a U.S. company that provides a secure communication platform purpose-built for the financial industry, the bank aims to modernize a wealth management sales practice that has, until now, relied primarily on email and phone calls.
Financial firms are currently at a critical inflection point. Just a few short years ago, AI agents were largely a conceptual exercise, confined to the edges of innovation labs. Today, the conversation has shifted entirely. Institutions are no longer asking if they should deploy AI agents across their workflows, but how to do so without introducing compliance exposure, data risk or operational gaps.
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