Can Service Providers Save Unified Messaging? - Technology Information

Telecommunications, Nov, 2000 by Patrick Flanagan

The lean and hungry ASPs, ISPs and CLECs are viewing UM as a killer application that can create sticky customer relationships.

After much initial market hype, unified messaging (UM), the method by which customers can access e-mail, voice mail and fax messages through a single interface, is treading water. Although the technology is becoming more available and savings seem attractive, so far UM is an application waiting for a market. While it has seen limited play in the enterprise, a catalyst needs to come from the service provider market--CLECs, ASPs (application service providers) and ISPs--for the technology to live up to its potential. According to analysts, these new providers view UM as having killer application potential, although few deals have been announced and few end users and businesses are actually receiving service.

The allure of UM is fast growing revenues from a value-added service that creates sticky customer relationships. According to the Pelorus Group, U.S. revenues from UM end users will total between $20 million and $37.5 million this year, with the equipment market reaching $145 million. To live up to the Pelorus prediction of $6.3 billion by 2004, UM needs to hit the mainstream.

Blair Pleasant, director of communications analysis for Pelorus, said UM will live up to expectations when service providers make it a priority. "The UM market requires education, and the old line carriers are not willing to make the commitment to a service requiring this much missionary work," she said. Pleasant feels that CLECs, ASPs and ISPs are more likely to take on the work required to drive UM demand. "They can sell to both telcos and end users," she said. Wireless carriers are another provider segment with a strong UM interest, largely as a way to generate additional minutes from users who frequently call in for messages. However, for providers to make a go of UM, they need to clear a large hurdle: the requirement that end users be assigned a new e-mail address or cell phone number to access virtually all provider-based UM systems. "This is the biggest problem I see in UM right now," Pleasant said.

The Cost Justification Conundrum

Originally, UM pioneers thought the service would sell itself based on a simple ROI equation of time savings for highly paid workers. The productivity boost scenario was based on the assumption that as many as 40 percent of workers are "handicapped by mobility" and need to change location frequently while still receiving and replying to a large number of types of messages, according to Art Rosenberg of the Unified Communications Consortium. "These employees are the core of unified messaging user demand," he said.

The problem is that while end users who now have UM would revolt if it were taken away, those that don't have UM are putting little pressure on employers to provide in-house or hosted UM services. "It's just not a priority with most companies, and therefore not a priority with the major carriers," Pleasant said. Vendors haven't given up on trying to make UM a priority with employers by pushing improved productivity. Avaya, a Lucent spin-off, conducted a study showing users gained an average of one hour of productivity a day. The Radicati Group's study for Lucent showed organizations recovering the investment in Lucent's Unified Messenger CPE in less than four months. AVT Corp., which produces the CallXpress UM system, calculated payback on its systems from three months to slightly more than a year, depending on the type of installation.

While these cost justification studies are convincing, they continue to meet resistance, giving life to a second ROI scenario: the ability of UM to reduce the administrative overhead needed to maintain multiple and separate messaging systems by simplifying things such as directory management. Laura Johnson of AVT said UM is able to "bring together the backend where there are multiple directories to manage adds, moves and changes under a single directory." Avaya is playing the same fiddle. Vinnie Deschamps, Avaya's UM general manager, looks beyond directory simplification to include security and labor costs. "When an employee leaves, how many databases do they need to be deleted from?" he asked. According to the Radicati study done for Avaya, a 70-percent savings can be gained from UM when compared to administering separate messaging systems.

Architecture Options

For providers to win the hearts of corporate users, they still have to sort out the complications created by legacy messaging systems. There are two basic architectures for delivering UM: integrated and unified. "Both deliver the same end result. End users see one in-basket where all their messages reside, and they can access them through the telephone or an e-mail client," Pleasant said. The success of the UM system is measured by "ease of use for end users and superior message management," she added.

The big difference is the back-end configuration. An integrated architecture uses peer-to-peer connections, usually with bidirectional synchronization, to move messages and headers to the appropriate server when retrieved. In the meantime, they reside on separate systems--voice messages on the voice mail server, e-mail on the e-mail server, and faxes on the fax server. Server software coordinates this process while the different message types are integrated into a single application through a GUI (graphic user interface). A unified architecture creates a single repository server for voice mail, e-mail and faxes, usually the existing e-mail system.