FAQs

Vikas Sharma, a national sales manager, has a short stopover at O’Hare

Airport, Chicago. Rather than wasting time flipping through magazines, he grabs

a pay phone to reach his personal messaging center on his company’s unified

messaging system (UMS). Using voice commands to navigate, he goes to voicemail

and checks his messages, responding to some, deleting some, forwarding some with

comments. He then reviews his e-mail and, based on header information, selects

some for listening. Again, he responds to some with voicemail, deletes some and

one he forwards to a staff member, attaching voice instructions to prepare a bid

and e-mail it to him by evening. Next, he records a voice message to his sales

staff, setting up a teleconference for the next day. He dictates another e-mail

to a major client who he knows is traveling in Europe and checking her e-mail

but not her voicemail. Finally, he e-mails a voice message to his family. All in

a single phone call.

Not bad!

Anjali Gupta, vice-president for research, is waiting to catch a delayed

flight at Mumbai airport. All pay phones are in use, but her company’s unified

messaging system supports mobile devices, so she simply dials in with her mobile

phone. She handles both voicemail and e-mail, as did Vikas, except she saves a

couple longer messages to download later to her laptop because the memory of the

mobile phone is limited. Giving up on the flight, she heads for a hotel. During

a long, slow, rush-hour trip from the airport to the hotel, Anjali again logs on

to the company’s unified messaging system, connecting her laptop through her

wireless phone, and downloads a time-critical message with a worksheet attached

from her boss. By the time she arrives at the hotel, she has edited the

worksheet, drafted the response her boss needs ASAP, and sent them off.

Again Vikas, the national sales manager, has a short layover at O’Hare and

despite not receiving the important message from his boss, he is not worried at

all. In fact, he now has a virtual personal assistant (VPA) in place to manage

his messages. The VPA has full set of instructions on when and where to contact

him. If it’s a workday between 8 am and 6 pm and Vikas is not traveling, VPA

will ‘ring’ his desktop. If Vikas doesn’t respond, the VPA will try his

mobile and then every other number and address he has, as per the direction. If

it’s outside working hours or on the weekend, the VPA calls Vikas’ home

phone first. Between midnight and 6 am, the VPA doesn’t call at all unless the

boss’ message is tagged urgent. This time, however, the VPA has instructions

to find him and notify him as soon as any message from the boss arrives.

Finally, when the boss sends the message, Vikas gets it within minutes and is

able to respond immediately.

If you think these scenarios are bit too stretched for one’s imagination,

you would be wrong. This is the direction ‘messaging’ is heading in and

experts believe that UMS is only beginning its heady growth curve. Frost &

Sullivan projects the UMS market to boom from $549 million in 1999 to nearly $5

billion by 2005. According to a medium-growth forecast by the New Jersey-based

Pelorus Group, the market for unified messaging customer premise equipment (CPE)

products hit $145.02 million in 1999, up from $70.02 million in 1998. This is

expected to soar to $6.3 billion by 2004. Pelorus further forecasts that the

number of unified messaging CPE seats shipped worldwide will climb from 303,407

in 1998 to more than 2.4 million by 2004.

Great statistics, you might agree, but what the heck is UMS? Just what kind

of unification are we talking about here?

Building a new bridge

The prevailing metaphor used to describe unified messaging is the unified or

universal inbox, also called a ‘messaging center’. The user picks up e-mail,

faxes, voicemail and pages from a single ‘inbox’ and uses a common set of

tools and interfaces to create, send and manage these different types of

messages. An equally important concept in unified messaging is that of ‘universal

access’ to the inbox; that is, access to messages from any telephone, any

online computer, or any hybrid of the two–indeed, from any landline or

wireless device. Another interesting aspect of UMS is that of an intelligent

assistant that automatically manages the messaging center for the knowledge

worker.

No wonder unified messaging is a logical and appealing concept with broad

benefits for organizations of all sizes and hence the reason behind research

agencies projecting those heady numbers.

A win-win situation for all. For knowledge workers, it provides easy access

to information anywhere, anytime. For businesses, it saves time, increases

productivity, and lowers the total cost of ownership of messaging services. For

independent software vendors, system developers and service providers, it

provides an expanding global market for new products and services.

Says Parag Patankar, CIO, Apnaloan.com, the company which is actively

considering deployment of UMS, "If we look at a typical knowledge worker in

any modern office, he or she has to interact with several communication

touch-points viz. fax, telephone, pager, cellular phone, PDAs, e-mail and voice

mails. In today’s scenario, most of these communication touch points work

independently–which may lead to confusion, miscommunication or multiple

communications for same issues."

According to Himanshu Goel, technical sales manager, CommWorks, a 3Com

company, "UMS includes the integration of real-time communication such as

telephone calls with messaging and with existing business applications. It calls

for the convergence of all forms of messages–e-mail, voice, fax, SMS et all–into

a single system that can be accessed through any device."

Impact on legacy systems

Can you live without e-mail today? Chances are you might wonder how we

managed all these years without e-mail. Could be a similar situation some day

soon when it would be hard to understand how anyone got anything done when

e-mail, voicemail, paging and fax were separate systems, each requiring its own

particular set of devices, skills and procedures. UMS is certainly not intended

to do away with the existing communication channels. "Instead," says

Patankar, "it is all about tying these together to leverage on their

features and functionality by acting as a glue layer which permits these

channels to connect and understand each other.

Anil Sabnis, area manager, South Asia, Dialogic, says, "UMS is more of

an enhancement of existing systems, be it a fax or just a simple e-mail system

or voicemail. As a majority of the systems in the market are open systems or do

provide some openness, UMS fits in very well."

Hurdles ahead

While promoters of UMS have been talking about how unification of the

existing communication tool can change the way information is handled and hence

the business dynamics, UMS needs to address issues like integration woes, high

costs and customer misconceptions, to name just a few. According to experts, the

first migration issue that needs to be considered is its integration into the

existing messaging network. The main roadblock has been the difficulty of

getting legacy voice mail and PBX systems to work with e-mail and fax systems.

Currently, another key problem with UMS is that almost each vendor has its

own network architectures and deployment. The silver lining is that with the

Internet’s explosive growth, multiple messaging technologies are being

integrated into a standard, interoperable environment using the Internet

messaging protocol.

The second difficulty relates to the ‘usability’ of the solutions from a

user perspective. Early offerings have not been particularly easy to use–with

the average user has finding it difficult to actually get their e-mail, voice

mail and fax from one box due to poor interface design as well as the

unacceptable application response times.

The third issue is the high cost of embracing UMS. Different vendors have

different architectural approaches for unified messaging that can affect price.

Some vendors’ architectures call for a separate server dedicated to unified

messaging. Others require independent servers for voice, e-mail, and fax with

bridging software that provides a ‘glue’ layer and single interface.

All this adds to the implementation cost. The high cost of offering UMS also

relates to the high cost of supporting the product and training the users as the

new solutions become more and more complex.

The final concern, however, is about winning customer acceptance. Says

Patankar, "This essentially relates to the pains and pangs of reorganizing

the structure, re-allocation of responsibilities and the associated cost of

training or re-training manpower to cope up with the new applications and

responsibilities." The good news is that improved techniques and more

widespread deployment of interoperation standards, experts believe, will be able

to reduce interoperation and migration barriers.

According to a study conducted by the US-based Unified Messaging Consortium,

‘unified messaging’ stands in the same place that e-mail and voicemail did

at their inception–important for some and a potential for most. However,

e-mail, voicemail, and fax have now become critical and essential methods of

messaging communication and it is time to make them more efficient to use and

manage in an integrated multimedia environment. What’s more, the report adds,

"As the Internet standards drives both legacy e-mail and voicemail towards

becoming open, public services, the traditional electronic islands of enterprise

messaging are also being forced to become part of the global network of

integrated and unified person-to-person communications. It’s not a question of

if, but when all this will take place."

Shubhendu Parth in New Delhi