We have recently completed a major new study of the unified communications and unified messaging markets and will be publishing a report on our findings. One of the issues that we wanted to explore is the perception about the impact of unified messaging on employee productivity, focusing on different types of employees in midsized and large organizations.

IT decision makers and influencers believe that just under one in five “typical” employees in their organizations would become much more productive if offered a unified messaging system. However, these same decision makers and influencers believe that 24% of senior, non-IT managers would realize this level of productivity gain from the use of unified messaging; while 31% of IT staff would become much more productive from the use of unified messaging (Compare Messaging products) .

On the downside, however, more than two in five IT decision makers and influencers anticipate that unified messaging will increase the overall amount of time that IT spends on managing messaging functionality, while 28% believe that unified messaging will increase the overall cost of messaging in their organization.

The conclusion by many decision makers, therefore, is that unified messaging will significantly improve end user productivity, but at the cost of driving up IT expenses for managing the integrated infrastructure. However, the latter perception is counter to what we expect will happen in most organizations that deploy unified messaging: because a unified messaging system will allow voicemail and fax to be integrated into the e-mail infrastructure, we expect that the vast majority of organizations will experience greater efficiencies and, ultimately, will be able to manage e-mail, voice and fax capabilities with fewer person-hours in the IT department.

I’d like to hear your experiences if you’ve implemented a unified messaging system, either by commenting on this article or sending me an e-mail. Thanks in advance for your comments.

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.