Is unified messaging finally poised to realize its long awaited promise to improve voice messaging delivery, storage and retrieval?

Before there was unified communications, there was unified messaging. Is unified messaging finally poised to realize its long awaited promise to improve voice messaging delivery, storage and retrieval?From a marketing acceptance perspective, unified messaging has many similarities with another UC application: video conferencing. Both came on the market many years ago with tremendous promise to improve communication and collaboration, but up until recently adoptions were hampered by business case and complexity issues. I've noted in the past the rapid adoption of video conferencing led by new technologies including high definition and telepresence. Are we finally poised to see a similar up-tick in UM?

The answer is yes. Over half of Nemertes research participants are deploying or planning to deploy unified messaging for a number of reasons:

* Obsolescence of existing systems: In May of 2006 Avaya announced an end-of-life schedule for the Octel voice messaging platforms, including models 200/300 and 250/350. Avaya ended sales of new cabinets in June of 2006, and expansions to current systems in June of 2007. In 2011 Avaya will end all support for the Octel platform. With vendors such as Avaya phasing out their traditional voicemail platforms, enterprises are faced with an increasing difficulty of both supporting aging systems and expanding them as necessary without a guaranteed supply of components.

* Management challenges: Many enterprises are supporting stand-alone islands of voicemail systems, with no way to transfer messages between users on different systems, and without a way to centrally manage systems as a single entity. The myriad existing systems from various manufacturers adds significant training and support costs. Distributed systems mean that it is difficult to leverage economies of scale that come from a homogeneous voice messaging environment. Instead, enterprises must maintain a variety of different skill sets, depending on the system at each location or within in each business unit. These skills are becoming increasingly harder to obtain as older systems become obsolete. In most organizations with more than one voicemail server there is no easy way to send out an enterprise-wide voice message.

* Compliance: Legacy voicemail systems can't meet emerging e-Discovery requirements. Voicemail systems do not store header information such as caller, call-time, or other information required to track who called whom and when. Systems such as Octel and Audix don't support an ability to search for specific calls, or to easily export messages for archiving.

* New features: As enterprises become increasingly virtual, with larger numbers of mobile professionals; time wasted by calling to check for messages is no longer tolerable. In addition, many users struggle with management of multiple message stores (e.g. desktop and cellular/mobile voicemail boxes). Wasted time and lost opportunities occur when faxes, such as contracts and proposals, cannot reach sales personnel in the field, or field workers must wait until they have Internet access to check for new messages.

So given the growing need to finally do something about voice messaging, where is a telecom architect to turn? A variety of vendor approaches exist:

* Those that integrate unified messaging with their VOIP offerings * Those that offer stand-alone unified messaging platforms * Those that integrate unified messaging with other applications * Hosted unified messaging services

Integrated offerings are widely available from leading VOIP vendors including Avaya, Cisco, Interactive Intelligence, Mitel, Nortel, and ShoreTel. While most of these vendors offer stand-alone versions of the unified messaging products, they all offer products that integrate into their VOIP offerings by sharing servers, appliances, or other devices to run VOIP and unified messaging on single set of systems.

Stand-alone vendors such as Active Voice, AVST, and IBM offer only dedicated, best-of-breed unified messaging systems designed to integrate with a wide variety of third-party messaging and telephony systems.

Many organizations have added Microsoft to their evaluation mix, thanks to Microsoft's addition of unified messaging as an available feature on its Office Exchange 2007 server and announced plans to improve UM capabilities in Exchange 2010. For companies that already have an Exchange 2007 platform, or have plans to deploy Exchange 2007, Microsoft presents an appealing opportunity to add unified messaging functions into existing or planned message stores without requiring external systems. But Microsoft's UM capabilities are limited compared to their telephony-based competition. Exchange UM requires third-party gateways to integrate with legacy telephony and voicemail systems, or third-party VOIP systems; has limited backwards compatibility; and may not support compliance requirements, meaning additional cost and complexity for administrators and end-users.

Finally, service providers such as AT&T, Sprint and Verizon offer hosted unified messaging services, typically designed for the individual user, small-to-medium-sized businesses, or users of Centrex or hosted VOIP services.

A wild-card in the UM space is Google, which has recently revamped its Grand Central acquisition into "Google Voice," currently a free unified messaging and in-bound call-routing service. However availability is limited only to previous Grand Central users and Google offers no capability to integrate with existing voicemail services or support compliance requirements.

All of these approaches have various merits and drawbacks. Only by first understanding requirements around management, integration, compliance, security, features, compatibility, and cost can an IT architect make an informed decision as to the "right" architecture for their organization.

Conclusion As a replacement for aging, and increasingly obsolete stand-alone voice-messaging systems, unified messaging offers significant organizational benefits compared with traditional voice messaging, thus saving time, improving flexibility, and productivity of the virtual worker while offering the potential to deliver new services and reduce management and operations costs. Unified messaging also provides a key component of a unified communications architecture, enabling integrated access to a variety of stored messaging systems such as fax, e-mail, voice, and-in some cases-video.

Selecting the right unified messaging solution requires a careful examination of requirements, from user, IT, and management. Vendor approaches vary based on areas such as integration with VOIP platforms, support for distributed environments, and message storage options. Enterprises should conduct a careful assessment of their requirements to choose the optimal vendor.Is unified messaging finally poised to realize its long awaited promise to improve voice messaging delivery, storage and retrieval?