4 Introduction Current market developments 5 introduCtion The digital trans<strong>for</strong>mation is putting enormous pressure to innovate on companies. They have to maintain or restructure their competitiveness by orienting business models, products or services, but also processes toward the demands of a digitalised society. The high degree of mobility and intensive digital collaboration across physical boundaries required <strong>for</strong> this demands a new type of internal and external cooperation and the shift toward a global workplace. <strong>Enterprise</strong> <strong>Messaging</strong> as a mobile communication headquarters is thus an essential component: as a mobile office, as a quick messaging tool against the flood of e-mails, and as an activation and optimisation tool <strong>for</strong> workflows. The objective of this whitepaper is to emphasise the significance and the potential of messaging apps <strong>for</strong> business use, and to highlight the risks of common tools like <strong>WhatsApp</strong>. Using a fixed market overview, safe alternatives will be presented and categorised in order to simplify companies‘ introduction into the world of <strong>Enterprise</strong> <strong>Messaging</strong>. CurrEnt MarkEt dEvElopMEnts <strong>WhatsApp</strong> now has more than one billion users who are active at least once per month. 42 billion messages are sent every day, and there are more than one billion groups in which these users send messages 1 . Facebook Messenger also boasts more than one billion users as of 2016 2 . Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, has a simple explanation <strong>for</strong> the hype. He believes that messaging is one of the few activities that people engage in more frequently than social networking 3 . This is because messaging apps have ceased to solely serve as a means of communication that allows <strong>for</strong> the quick and direct exchange of messages, images, or .gifs in real time. More and more functions and services have become integrated via API interfaces or third parties in the meantime: shopping via the messaging app, personal style consultation, or reserving a taxi are only a few types of application that have already been implemented outside Germany. Yet mobile communication apps play a central role not just in one‘s private life, but in companies as well. This is illustrated by the Adobe study „Driving competitive advantage with enterprise mobile apps“ published in October. Among the 250 German managers polled, from such areas as Personnel Management, Sales, and Marketing, 75 % of participants reported that they use mobile enterprise apps. This is an impressive number when one considers that this places Germany, often considered rather bureaucratic and conservative, in third place in front of the USA and UK, and behind India and China. Employees are also taking better advantage of this opportunity. The number of employees who use mobile enterprise apps has continuously increased by more than 66 % in the last two years. The results of the study show that <strong>Enterprise</strong> <strong>Messaging</strong> apps are of great significance: messaging & collaboration, customer service, CRM, and sales applications will be the areas of application with top priority, especially throughout the next three years. This preference is based in the growing demand <strong>for</strong> team-internal, quick, mobile, direct communication as a crucial element of the digital workplace of the future. Although there is awareness of the topics of data protection and data security according to the study (more than 50 % of those polled reported that this is the most important feature of mobile applications), the majority of companies are still in the early stages of using <strong>Enterprise</strong> <strong>Messaging</strong> solutions. Consumer apps like <strong>WhatsApp</strong> will increasingly be employed in professional environments as an effective communication medium - often without the companies knowing. This is exactly why companies must act, because these computer apps were not conceived <strong>for</strong> companies. They neither fulfil the companies‘ mandatory compliance and data protection regulations, nor can they increase long-term productivity within the team. Professional messaging apps thus have four points in their favour. 1 = http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/<strong>WhatsApp</strong>-hat-eine-Milliarde-aktive-Nutzer-3089551.html 2 = https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/419453/umfrage/anzahl-der-monatlich-aktiven-nutzer-des-facebook-messengers-weltweit/ 3 = https://blog.bufferapp.com/messaging-apps
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