Posted: 03/2000
Unified Messaging--
Technology Even Your Mother Will Love
By James R. Dukart
The simplest way to define UM is to say it's about allowing multiple devices to access multiple message formats in multiple locations through various interfaces.y mother may not know it yet, but she's on the leading edge of a communications revolution.
Two years ago, she probably had never heard of e-mail. As recently as a few months back, I never had seen her type on a computer. Today, she is an e-mail fiend. She sends me messages on a regular basis, and broadcasts family news to relatives scattered throughout the country.
That's right, my mother is in training to be a unified messenger.
According to Forrester Research Inc. (www.forrester.com), more than one billion personal messages traveled daily in 1998 between individuals and groups via mailboxes, answering machines and PCs in users' homes. That number ignores millions more messages in the corporate world. The data also were compiled before people like my mother ever had logged on and sent their first e-mail.
Imagine what that number might grow to be in the next several years and you have the makings for what may become the next "killer app" of the telephony world--unified messaging (UM).
The simplest way to define UM is to say it's about allowing multiple devices to access multiple message formats in multiple locations through various interfaces. That is, communications systems such as the wired telephone system, Internet, paging services, wireless networks and e-mail systems all get mixed into one unified communications network.
This network, in turn, can be accessed via wired phone, cell phone, fax, e-mail or any other type of reading or deciphering device. No matter what method is used to send or receive the message, they all work together seamlessly to deliver the information.
It's a tall challenge, but with its astounding market potential, it has vendors, service providers, enterprises and end-user customers chasing leading-edge solutions.
Market in Its Infancy
The International Engineering Consortium (IEC, www.iec.org), a nonprofit organization that studies developing communications technologies, says unified messaging is still in its early stages. It expects a dramatic uptick in coming years.
The organization estimates that currently about 100,000 UM users exist throughout the country. That is a figure that is expected to grow dramatically and quickly during the next several years, IEC expects.
"Right now, UM is still in its infancy stage," says Michael H. Janowiak, IEC director of research and publications. "As they did with answering machines and portable phones, UM users will go through several phases of adoption, from resistance and reluctance to acceptance and enthusiasm."
Janowiak says UM will start to take off in 2001 and enter its "boom phase" in 2003.
That boom phase will provide interesting opportunities for the companies that provide UM hardware, software and consulting, as well as for service providers who can offer UM to their existing clients. There are, after all, two main sources of messaging today, e-mail systems and voice mail systems. The combination constitutes the bulk of any unified messaging system.
According to the Electronic Messaging Association (EMA, www.ema.org), the number of active e-mail users has doubled in the past several years, growing from 54 million in 1996 to 108 million by the end of this year. On the telecom side, voice mail has become the leading value-added service for new and old telcos alike.
"Voice mail has been one of the most lucrative businesses in their [telcos] world," says Edmond Leung, marketing director for UM provider United Connections Inc. (UniCONN, www.uniconn.com) "Pacific Bell [www.pacbell.com] has over a million subscribers to voice mail and they charge $8 per user per month, so it's a real cash cow, one of the most lucrative value-added services."
What UniCONN and other UM vendors want is to help carriers milk that cash cow for more, while at the same time helping businesses and customers do more for less, Leung says.
Benefits and Drivers
"There are two things that pay off almost immediately for unified messaging users," Leung says. "First is convenience, being able to have a single point of access from a computer or phone. That by itself can pay great dividends in terms of time and getting the right messages to the right people."
Next are cost savings.
"Take for example collecting faxes," Leung says. "You don't have to have a second line and don't have to buy a fax machine, you can have personal fax and do it all via a web interface."
Vice president of market communications for software maker Interactive Intelligence Inc. (www.inter-intelli.com), Joe Adams says unified messaging is a response to "the tremendous exponential growth in the number of communications methods being utilized by the public."
Interactive Intelligence sells a Java virtual machine that runs on standard Pentium machines running Windows NT. He says, the company's Enterprise Interaction Center (EIC) connects computers; heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems; e-mail; faxes and phones, and one of the end results is a universal inbox for all communications.
Adams also says Interactive Intelligence has installed such systems at the Pentagon, Justice Department, the Los Alamos National Laboratory (www.igpp.lanl.gov), several universities and hundreds of companies. It has more than 400 systems in use in 17 countries and operates in nine different languages around the world.
"There is a tremendous amount of pain on the part of companies trying to keep up with disparate communications technologies," Adams says. "One of the key attributes of any effective UM system has to be simplicity and ease of use."
President of Tornado Development Inc. (www.tornadodevelopment.com) Kevin Torf agrees.
"Unified messaging has got to be easy to use in order for people to accept it," says Torf, from his Manhattan Beach, Calif., office.
"The fax machine was a very simple concept--you put in a piece of paper and you receive one back," Torf says, citing 3Com Corp.'s (www.3com.com) Palm Pilot as technologies that have survived and thrived because of their ease of use.
Among the best news for UM is that so many more people are becoming familiar with e-mail, Torf adds.
"People are getting used to the way e-mail works and operates. We've worked with voice mail for some time now, and faxing is very common, so now you have all the elements in place. What you are trying to do now is give additional value to working between those forms."
Another major contributor to the development and acceptance of UM is Internet development.
"The most significant change has been the Internet, because it has provided a form of distribution that never existed before," Torf says. "It is the Internet that will let unified messaging providers develop solutions cost-effectively enough to appeal to consumers."
Even if UM does not appeal immediately to mass consumer markets, Torf argues that terrific opportunities to develop messaging for specific vertical markets exist.
An example is messaging for real estate brokers, he says. Tornado recently inked a deal with Homeseekers.com to provide unified messaging services to the organization's registered real estate brokers. Under the new system, agents in the field are notified immediately by cell phone whenever someone tries to reach them via the Homeseekers.com website.
"They get real-time, instantaneous notification of unified messaging," Torf says, a product that Homeseekers.com can sell to brokers for $900 to $1,000 per year. "Is that worthwhile to a real estate agent? The answer is a categorical yes."
Torf adds that vertical markets also offer an opportunity for carriers. "The ILECs and CLECs can be successful by running UM for these different markets. They can do this for any site that needs to communicate with consumers, and they will be more successful doing that than in mass marketing unified messaging to consumers."
Obstacles and Markets
Adams says one obstacle to widespread UM adoption is current corporate infrastructure, where fax machines are separate from phone systems and web interfaces are not always tied into a company's PBX or Centrex system.
"It can be very cost prohibitive to try to glue them all together," Adams says. "Even if you do, you have very little integration and no interactive management platform."
Another obstacle is large carrier reluctance to move away from proprietary voice mail and interactive voice response (IVR) systems, he says.
"Some of the carriers are going to be dragged kicking and screaming into this market. The Lucents (www.lucent.com) and Nortels (www.nortelnetworks.com) have been making billions of dollars selling proprietary systems, and they are not going to be that keen on technology that lets you do more with less capital investment while offering greater control over the interaction."
Frederick Kunzi is the chief technolody officer for CTC Communications Corp. (www.ctcnet.com), an integrated communications provider based in Waltham, Mass. that serves the northeastern United States, specifically the Washingont, D.C. to Boston corridor. He has been instrumental in installing and provisioning CTC's IntelliNET network to provice unified messaging and converged voice and data services.
Adams, Kunzi and the IEC agree that small and medium-sized businesses represent the hottest near-term markets for UM.
An IEC report says companies with between 500 and 3,000 employees are the current sweet spot for UM services. Many of these firms have messaging needs extensive enough to reap the benefits of UM but without extensive previously installed communications infrastructures to slow its adoption.
Other hot markets include individuals and small office/home office (SOHO), the IEC says.
Larger companies won't be able to delay for long. According to recent studies, the average Fortune 1000 worker uses an average of six communications tools every day and that an average office worker gets more than 175 messages per day, the IEC reports.
"To build a unified messaging system is relatively expensive, while to buy one is quite competitive," says Kunzi, adding that CTC is confident pricing for basic UM services will settle around $5 per month per user.
In addition to the individual and SOHO markets, Kunzi lists a couple of vertical markets that are ripe for unified messages.
"Health care has a lot of people who have cellular phones or pagers," Kunzi says. "There's communications between ambulances and the hospitals, and so we don't have to go very far in a hospital campus for UM to play a critical role. In retail, there is a great deal of activity in sales, with people needing access to information from anywhere at any time and time is very critical."
In geographic terms, Kunzi says a direct correlation can be measured between the evolution of UM and the development of the telephone or Internet networks within a country or region.
"There is a lot of work to do for carriers nationwide and across the world to enable these systems to work," Kunzi says. "The most Internet-centric countries are the most ready."
Intelligent Messaging
Another development that might help UM gain widespread acceptance will be the integration of intelligent messaging. Intelligent messaging means allowing users to sort, evaluate and respond to messages based on message characteristics such as origin, date, time or urgency status.
An example would be redirection of messages marked urgent from an e-mail box to a pager or blocking of all messages of a nonurgent nature when checking messages from the road.
Other intelligent messaging features could include automated response, automatic forward, follow-me numbers, multilingual and broadcast messaging.
Matt Coffy is the indirect channel manager for service providers for GoAmerica Communications Corp. (www.goamerica.net), which markets filtering devices, forwarding devices and UM services to carriers. He says intelligent messaging is the critical next step in the evolution of UM, a step and a process that will eventually result in true unified communications rather than simply UM.
"Most people who are busy don't have time to administer a lot of devices," Coffy says. "You have to focus on making it easy to make a path for the essentials to get to you."
Coffy calls today's UM technology and devices "just kind of kludgy" making it hard to predict what devices or services will take over.
He predicts that within a few years, devices and mailboxes will not matter nearly as much as the ability to set a communications path. "The messaging will go away, and we are not really going to have mailboxes per se, but more of a communications path," he says.
Using his life as an example, Coffy says he has set his messaging preferences to notify him immediately of only the top 10 percent of his messages, "what I really need to read."
Those messages, "hit me in the side of my belt, and that's just fine," he says. The rest he can read later, when he has more time.
Adams sees a similar future. "The next stage is personal IVR [Interactive Voice Response]." That means users will set up filters and handle things in a personal way, using as an example a rule that tells the system to interrupt during a meeting only if a message comes in from a family member stating an emergency.
Graph: Projected Revenue Growth of
UM Products and Services (1998 - 2003)
Graph: Projected Revenue Growth of
Unified - Messaging Mailboxes (1998 - 2003)
Another important feature will be the ability to reverse the order of messages or to review messages by criteria such as the origin or name of the sender, he says.
Torf also sees other exciting developments in the UM field. One is the integration of UM into products and services like electronic calendars and scheduling software to add notification of important dates, meetings and appointments.
Another good use of UM would be to link with financial services firms that can send portfolio updates and investment news messages throughout the day and night, he says.
Intelligent messaging will continue to evolve, as users demand ways to read and respond to messages, and to "sort, order and work them even before they are read," Torf says.
Regarding ease of use and consumer acceptance, Torf says he expects to see development this year in voice recognition, which he says will provide"very, very significant functionality" to UM. When that happens, the technology will be so user friendly anyone will want to use it.
Perhaps even that e-mail fiend and budding unified messenger, my mother.
James R. Dukart is a freelance writer based in Minneapolis. He can be reached at JDukart@aol.com
