Eagle Investment Systems has some 200 employees using corporate-owned iPads with Jabber, a Cisco app for instant messaging, voice, video and conferencing that Cisco extended to iPad and Windows in March. In the next 12 to 18 months, this number should grow to 600 employees. Roughly half of these employees will be outside the United States, in countries such as England, China, Poland and the Arab states.

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It's not just videoconferencing, either. Mobile devices are changing the way employees talk to each other. Late last year, Eagle Investment Systems studied how its employees were communicating internally and found a massive shift underway: more instant messaging sessions than email sessions.

Of course, iPads, iPhones and other smartphones and tablets are great instant-messaging devices. "We think the Jabber component will very quickly become the predominant dashboard for how our users will communicate and collaborate internally," Fitzgerald says.

Mike Fitzgerald, managing director and head of IS at Eagle Investment Systems