UNIFIED MESSAGING SYSTEM: Messaging Genie Comes to Town

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."

FAQs

Shubhendu Parth in New Delhi