Alot of tech writing is filled with premature obituaries, whenever something new arrives on the horizon. Twitter launched? Facebook is dead! Instagram launched? Flickr is dead! Tumblr launched? Blogs are dead! No technology has been written off more often than email.

Illustration by Raajan/ Mint

It doesn’t help that the Union government wants access to encrypted emails across all telcos and handset makers in the country for security reasons. Research in Motion (the makers of BlackBerry) complied with this on Monday, by allowing the government access to encrypted messages on BlackBerry messenger.

Email though still remains a very important tool for businesses, but today, we are also seeing a number of enterprise social networks that make collaboration and information sharing on the cloud easier.

Such services could be a real alternative to email, or could at least change the way it is used by businesses. We spoke to four senior executives to give us their take on the future of email.

Against email

Minhaj Zia

Director, collaboration, Cisco Systems India and Saarc Pvt Ltd, New Delhi

Minhaj Zia

Today, organizations are being forced to manage a broad range of business complexities: information and content overload, communication/application silos, an increasingly mobile and dispersed workforce, accelerating innovation and time to market, and, of course, driving sustainable growth in an increasingly competitive environment.

These kinds of challenges require organizations to change the way they work —from a transaction-oriented era, to a more interaction-oriented era, where technologies like enterprise social networking and video conferencing are critical and will show significant adoption in the future.

At Cisco, we have developed a social network for enterprise use called Cisco Quad, which is the primary means of communication within the organization. Over 70,000 Cisco employees use Cisco Quad. It has helped us break down silos by bringing about virtual workforce capabilities.

While email has been the de facto standard for communication in most organizations, given the limitations of emails and the added advantages of social technologies, enterprise social networking is gaining importance, particularly in internal communications like project management, sharing and capturing knowledge and feedback, etc.

When there is a need to share knowledge and ideas easily across the enterprise, collaborate across geographic and organizational boundaries, publish information for general consumption and search for experts, purpose-built enterprise social networking platforms are a much better option than email, and can save both time and money.

Sachin Dev Duggal

CEO and co-founder, nivio, Mumbai

Sachin Dev Duggal

Emails are passé; and not just because a bunch of geeks decided so. There are five major issues with email. One, the file/search system is limited, and can waste hours over the course of a week with incorrect search results. Two, email is largely used for conversation, and not information. Other methods of instant communication are far more relevant for conversation. Three, attachments are a problem. Email is used to send files but this wastes storage space, and creates confusion because people don’t know which version is the latest.

Four, no feeds—email does not allow non-traditional inputs. The only people who see it are the ones marked on it. As roles in companies go “grey”, with people collaborating outside their silo, having feeds allows the intellect of the entire organization to feed into a thought. And five, non-deletion is a problem. Email is archived for formal compliance issues, which means that there is a server with this data being maintained, without reason, for many organizations.

And here is proof—I opened Yammer (enterprise social network) less than six months ago at nivio—initially with four people. Within 24 hours, 40% of the organization was on it. My email traffic went from 500 emails to 60 and I didn’t have to answer everything even if I was tagged on it. Someone else could answer it if they thought it was appropriate, and I could respond later. This helps free up time and also creates a community culture in the company, encouraging teamwork. Yammer solves our five-point email problem. It allows us to work faster, more efficiently, without having to waste precious resources on managing email, and saves time across the company.

For email

Asheesh Raina

Principal research analyst, Gartner Inc. (India), Mumbai

Asheesh Raina

Email is far from being “dead”. Email is a set-purpose communication tool, and it is doing extremely well. The use of email has grown significantly, and continues to grow across Indian corporations. Today, email services have also matured to offer reminders, tasks and calendars, and email is also established as a formal communication. Email can be authenticated and verified, and because it is so widely used, in many cases, email can be used in place of a printed letter for company communications. All this information is also archived, and can be kept as a long-term record, as per company practices.

On the other hand, junk mail and spam are a problem, but there are simple steps companies can follow to keep that under control. For example, many companies do not allow a “Reply to All” option—this single step can make a huge difference. There is a cost associated with processing and maintaining the large amount of data that emails need, but even with the possibility of misuse, the problems with email don’t come close to matching the benefits it confers.

Email is certainly not going away anytime soon in India, or globally. Some organizations, particularly start-ups which don’t have to worry about legacy systems, around the world are switching to new systems, such as internal social networks, but that is an add-on, and not a replacement for email. These programs have several benefits—you can use them for brainstorming sessions where not everything needs to be archived, or for blogging, or human resources loyalty programmes, but the main use of such a network is small internal communication. It doesn’t replace the set purpose of email at all.

Sunil Lalwani

Director, enterprise sales (India), Research In Motion, New Delhi

Sunil Lalwani

Is email on the decline? Speaking first, for what we see in our own company—definitely not. At RIM (Research In Motion), we use a solution that relies most on email, but also includes BBM (BlackBerry messenger) and collaboration tools. Each of these has their pros and cons, so using email to co-author documents, for example, doesn’t make sense, but sending an instant message with important information that you need to keep in an archive, instead of using email, doesn’t work either.

From what we see in terms of the use of enterprise email on BlackBerry handsets in India, email is growing rapidly. We can’t share our exact numbers, but we have seen consistent growth for four years now. The number of users who are accessing enterprise email on their desktops will be significantly higher. We see the numbers virtually doubling each year, because the market is still underpenetrated, and we see no slowdown at all.

What we have observed is that more companies are adopting internal mail, particularly if they have high security requirements, such as companies in the financial sector. This is because the certification requirements in those industries means that social networking and instant messaging tools, even BBM, are not allowed, for security reasons. There are international compliance norms in place for email, because it’s a standard system.

Globally, things are a little different —there is a trend to move things to the cloud, which reduces email load. However, the Internet infrastructure to support the cloud is far more demanding, and in India, we are not quite ready for it yet. Email is an asynchronous system, and works far better.

gopal.s@livemint.com