t is the New Year, I’m happy, and I’m looking forward to a great year!!!!   I think I have got a great attitude, but………………

I am getting really tired of those people who want to talk about “email’s going away”, “email’s dead”, “we are at the end of email”, blah, blah, blah.  It seems like they love to quote reports from 2009 and 2010 that talk about the anticipated growth of social networks and how email was at its peak in 2008 and was going nowhere but down from there.

Of course, I’d be crazy to say that we haven’t seen a big increase in social networking, and it’s even making some headway with corporations.  Heck, even Microsoft got involved with its purchase of Yammer in 2012.  But let’s really look at the numbers from the standpoint of corporations/enterprises, and let’s get those numbers from people who know what they’re talking about and truly study the space.

The Radicatti Group is a well know analyst that focuses on corporate technologies.  Here is part of what they found in their 2012 Email Statistics Report (the link to the full report is below):

“The total number of worldwide email accounts is expected to increase from 3.3 billion accounts in 2012 to over 4.3 billion accounts by year-end 2016. This represents an average annual growth rate of 6% over the next four years.”

“In 2012, consumer email accounts represent 75% of worldwide mailboxes, while corporate (i.e. business) email accounts represent 25% of worldwide mailboxes. Over the next four years, we expect corporate email accounts to increase at a faster pace than consumer email accounts, as organizations continue to extend email services to employees who may not have had access to email in the past.”

There is a great table in the report that shows corporate email accounts growing from 850 million in 2012 to 1.15 billion by 2016, increasing to 27% of the total number of email accounts.  In contrast, from what I could find online, when Microsoft purchased Yammer in 2012 they had about 4 million users or less than one half of a percent of the corporate email users in 2012.

The Radicatti report goes on to say:

“Most of the world’s email traffic comes from the corporate world. In 2012, the number of businesses emails sent and received per day total 89 billion. This figure is expected to grow at an average annual rate of 13% over the next four years, reaching over 143 billion by year-end 2016.” 

If all of those numbers from The Radicatti Group aren’t enough to convince you that all is well in email-land, I think this quote and graphic from the Responsys website says it all:

“Combine every Facebook update and every Twitter tweet and multiply by 100. That’s still less than 1% of the email sent every day.”

So, the real question is not; “What’s going to replace email?”, it is “How do we make email better?”.

That’s what we are doing at FormVerse.  Check it out!  www.formverse.com

HAPPY NEW YEAR!