Take a typical work day - you come in, grab yourself a coffee, sit at your desk, log in and start to browse through the multitude of emails that awaits you. Some are important, some may be urgent, but most are destined for the trash. You plough through your inbox, replying to some and flagging others for later. By the time your real work starts, your coffee’s gone cold! Thankfully, change is on its way and email may soon be overshadowed, leaving many companies wondering whether the end of email is nigh.

The idea of a workplace without email may seem unimaginable but it’s not the most effective way of managing projects and communication. Some companies are said to be losing up to 20 days per person per year dealing with email poorly and if you factor in the 100 billion spam emails sent daily, the figures speak for themselves. Security is another big concern. Business leaders are confronted with the dangers of unprotected emails almost daily but fewer than 21 percent of companies use an email encryption solution. It’s hardly surprising that people are increasingly turning away from email, both at work and at home.

Change is finally on the horizon and there are now a number of viable alternatives that pose a genuine threat to email’s dominance. Yammer and Chatter, for example, both provide internal social networks for companies which enable person-to-person communication similar to Facebook’s walls and allow you to create meetings and share documents, as well as a host of other features. Big names like Ford, eBay, and DHL have already adopted Yammer, a powerful testament to its potential as an alternative to email.

While these technologies offer significant promise for the future of business communications, email hasn’t reached a dead-end just yet, but business’s reliance on it as the primary means of communication may be coming to an end.