Unified messaging perceptions and realities

We have just completed a major study of the unified communications market in which we surveyed IT decision-makers and influencers. While we’re still analyzing the data, an important finding has emerged. More than a third of respondents told us they believe that unified messaging will dramatically increase overall messaging storage requirements, while most of the remaining decision makers believe that unified messaging will have relatively modest impacts on overall storage requirements, but will increase them nonetheless.

That’s a logical conclusion, given that in a unified messaging system mailboxes will become the repository of not only e-mail; but also voicemail, faxes, instant messaging threads and other content. However, the problem with significant growth in storage requirements brought about by unified messaging is that this will exacerbate the most serious problem that messaging decision makers face today: growth in messaging-related storage. We have found messaging storage to be the most serious problem faced by messaging managers in a variety of surveys we’ve completed.

So, vendors are attempting to move decision makers toward a unified messaging model that will significantly increase storage requirements, while these decision makers view storage as their most serious problem in managing messaging. The obvious solution, then, is for vendors and organizations to focus on storage management solutions as part of an overall unified messaging deployment strategy. Archiving is one solution to the problem, since it moves messaging data to less expensive archival storage systems while making older data accessible to users.

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We have just completed a major study of the unified communications market in which we surveyed IT decision-makers and influencers. While we’re still analyzing the data, an important finding has emerged. More than a third of respondents told us they believe that unified messaging will dramatically increase overall messaging storage requirements, while most of the remaining decision makers believe that unified messaging will have relatively modest impacts on overall storage requirements, but will increase them nonetheless.

That’s a logical conclusion, given that in a unified messaging system mailboxes will become the repository of not only e-mail; but also voicemail, faxes, instant messaging threads and other content. However, the problem with significant growth in storage requirements brought about by unified messaging is that this will exacerbate the most serious problem that messaging decision makers face today: growth in messaging-related storage. We have found messaging storage to be the most serious problem faced by messaging managers in a variety of surveys we’ve completed.

So, vendors are attempting to move decision makers toward a unified messaging model that will significantly increase storage requirements, while these decision makers view storage as their most serious problem in managing messaging. The obvious solution, then, is for vendors and organizations to focus on storage management solutions as part of an overall unified messaging deployment strategy. Archiving is one solution to the problem, since it moves messaging data to less expensive archival storage systems while making older data accessible to users.

What is your organization planning to do about unified messaging and the storage problems that it presents? Will storage issues slow your plans for unified messaging? Please send me an e-mail with your thoughts.

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