The joke used to be that no piece of software was complete until it could send and receive email. Fast forward to today, replace email with realtime chat, and actually you might not be too far from the truth. Whether you’re delivering customer service, connecting community members, or helping colleagues communicate, realtime chat is quickly becoming a standard part of the web developer’s toolkit.

Ensuring constant availability to your customers in the competitive digital world is crucial for long-term business growth. But availability is just one of the reasons why small business owners should invest in the right chat tool, helpdesk software, and virtual call systems, or a comprehensive solution with multiple built-in functionalities.

Spending two decades in the middleware field has given me deep insight into the evolution of this technology domain. I began my career as a software engineer in a platform group, building reusable components using technologies like object linking and embedding (OLE), the distributed component object model (DCOM) and common object request broker architecture (CORBA).