The report titled 'Instant Messaging in Asia Pacific Enterprises: Key Trends and Market Insights' by the IT market research firm adds that nearly two-thirds of IM-using organisations ranked it as their top collaboration tool in terms of usage.

According to the report, enterprise instant messaging applications has started gaining attention from businesses, even though a majority of businesses in Asia Pacific use consumer instant messaging tools. With the exception of China, multinational vendors like Microsoft, Yahoo and IBM dominate the instant messaging landscape in Asia Pacific. In China, local vendors such as Tencent and mobile instant messaging provider PICA have a significant presence.

"IM is now recognised as an important communication tool and in many organisations, IM complements or even replaces relatively more expensive phone calls as a means of long-distance intra and inter-organisation communication," said Balaka Baruah Aggarwal, senior research manager -- emerging software at Springboard Research. "Consumer instant messaging tools are a key catalyst for organisations that go on to deploy more integrated and advanced communication and collaboration platforms," Aggarwal added.

Findings of this report are based on Springboard's interviews with 469 CIOs, IT managers and business managers in more than 400 large and small and medium enterprises in Australia, New Zealand, China, India, Malaysia, Philippines and Singapore.