Convergence /

Unified messaging needs divided assessment

By Lisa Pierce
Network World, 05/28/01

Unified messaging vendors often tout soft benefits that firms find difficult to quantify. Savings in IT administrative time is frequently highlighted, as is the case with many technologies.

However, this type of savings is not achievable for many customers who elect to add a unified messaging front-end to stand-alone voice and e-mail systems. The administrative benefits of unified messaging are more readily derived from greenfield, multipurpose unified messaging platforms.

Nevertheless, in the near term, most organizations will seek to maximize their investments in legacy systems and elect to follow an incremental approach to unified messaging. In such environments, IT administrative expense may actually increase with the adoption of unified messaging.

In most industries, office-bound users with access to voice mail and e-mail don't require unified messaging because the technology will save them only a few minutes per day. However, unified messaging can make a critical difference for employees whose jobs are directly linked to an organization's revenue stream. In-field service technicians are prime candidates, as are others engaged in sales.

Mobile and remote workers can benefit greatly from a tight linkage and integration of voice mail, e-mail and fax. As the distributed workforce grows, employees who work in virtual environments must maintain nearly constant accessibility and responsiveness to customers and peers. Simply put, unified messaging's ultimate value isn't saving time for IT administrators, but enhancing employee productivity.

While premises-based unified messaging technologies are available, it is the service providers that are wellsuited to help increase the productivity of mobile workers. These services decrease the risk of obsolescence of a premises-based product, require little or no in-house expertise and offer greater geographic availability at lower cost than unified messaging products.

Unfortunately, most unified messaging services are immature, because they are offered by start-up application service providers that typically lack a robust infrastructure for public switched telephone network (PSTN) or voice-over-IP inbound and outbound services.

These stand-alone providers soon will be challenged by established players offering enhanced services. Giga Information Group anticipates at least one Tier-1 U.S. provider will offer unified messaging services in the top 20 cities before year-end.

Enterprise-class unified messaging vendors or service providers that only use IP telephony will either change their products or go out of business. Already, some unified messaging systems support both PSTN and IP telephony. This is appropriate because most businesses will live in a hybrid circuit/packet world for the next five or six years.

However, over the long term, IP-based modular communications platforms will allow unified communications messages and real-time contact to be governed by a set of user-defined rules and preferences. Other important enabling technologies will be the maturation of Domain Name System capabilities, the deployment of 2.5G wireless services and the increasing availability of Wireless Application Protocol/XML-enabled devices.

The future of unified messaging is clear: Provider-based unified messaging services will dominate the market within three years.

Customers with mobile employees or knowledge workers for whom time is money make for excellent early adopters; they should begin implementing unified messaging services as soon as possible. However, most organizations should wait until robust services from a cadre of established providers are available - approximately in the second half of 2002.