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Plugging the Communications Time Drain
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February 20, 2003
By Sean Doherty
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Hey Buddy, Got Speech?
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Unified messaging started out as a simple concept: a single store for e-mail, voicemail and faxes. It promised to alleviate some of the pain for those who had to collect messages from multiple e-mail accounts and voicemail boxes on a daily basis or who lacked direct access to fax services.
But most enterprises have not reached this stage of simplicity. Why not? In short, because no one is talking.
Voicemail vendors have been evolving their products slowly to include features that go beyond voicemail, such as AA (autoattendant) and IVR (interactive voice response). Most, if not all, have climbed out of their PBXs and into the enterprise by offering a UM solution. This is not a new phenomenon. UM products have been interfacing PBXs with analog and digital line cards for years, touted by their vendors as voicemail replacements and a means of combining voicemail with e-mail and fax services. But the argument has not been compelling enough to nudge fax and e-mail vendors into getting together with voicemail vendors.
Fax servers are the cockroaches of the digital world. No matter how much we want them to go away, they not only survive, they keep multiplying. Why? They're cheap, they're easy to use, they work, and they have a good MTBF (mean time between failure). They get a piece of paper from Point A to Point B over the PSTN in a no-fuss, secure manner. And the receiving party can see a signature. That signature often translates to a closed sale, a signed contract or a firm order. Fax servers have a market, and there's no incentive for fax vendors to work with UM.
E-mail servers have not been receptive either. E-mail is essential for business communications and has become the central repository for non-real-time communication. The darlings of the digital world, e-mail servers are used to the world beating a path to them, not vice versa. Enterprises are in thrall to these creatures, and Lotus and Microsoft know it. E-mail vendors also have a market and no incentive to work with UM solutions.
UM products today interface with legacy PBXs and next-generation IP-enabled PBXs. They leverage enterprise resources such as a directories and e-mail servers using standard protocols like AMIS (Audio Messaging Interchange Specification) and VPIM (Voice Profile for Internet Mail) for legacy voicemail along with DMTF Fax Routing, IVM (Internet Voice Mail), LDAP, MIME, TAPI and SMTP to present a single message store of e-mail, fax and voice-mail messages.
But that's not all: UM also provides advanced call-filtering and call-routing techniques that follow users to their current locations and enable them to communicate with their preferred device, be it a handheld PDA or wireless phone. It also supports TTS (text-to-speech) engines and easy-to-use speech interfaces to send information such as messages, calendars, contacts and customer information to remote professionals using TUIs (telephone user interfaces) from wireless phones. Unified messaging is more than a single message store. It's becoming part of UC (unified communications) and enabling new wireless markets with speech-enabled applications.
As UM gets its makeover to UC and as wireless markets get comfortable with 3G products, we'll see more entrants to the UC playing field--entrants that are distinguishing themselves with open standards and clear paths for integration into enterprises. This will challenge single-vendor models flowing from proprietary PBXs with a best-of-breed approach that will make this space one to watch.
As this article goes to press, Active Voice Kinesis announced a unified communications solution for Exchange 5.5 and 2000. It will feature a ViewCall module that lets users manage live telephone traffic from the desktop. And later this year, Alcatel's Unified Communication system will move out of beta. It will bring together a CTI (computer-telephony integration) server, VXML media server, run-time J2EE application server and UM under a Linux OS (RedHat 7.2).
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