November 2000

BY CAROL DRZEWIANOWSKI

By now you've read all about unified messaging, why it's so great, and what it can do for you. So what next? Are you taking advantage of this technology? If not, what are you waiting for? Perhaps you think something better will come along? In fact, unified messaging is evolving into something else... something more...something called unified communications.

The Radicati Group released a study on unified messaging that claims that the market segment for unified messaging products will reach $264 million by year-end 2000, and is expected to grow to a worldwide market value of $3.76 billion by year-end 2004.

Despite strong growth in the product segment, however, the study projects that the services segment of the market will see the strongest growth over the next four years, as the market for unified messaging services grows from $38.8 million in 2000 to $9.8 billion by 2004. The study finds that the industry is increasingly shifting away from unified messaging and towards unified communications.

So what's the difference? Unified communications is more than just fax, e-mail, and voice mail. Vendors and service providers offering unified communications packages are enhancing their offerings to include real-time communication functions, video messaging, and Internet e-commerce transactions via WAP technology.

For example, blue-silicon has introduced Extended Enterprise Messaging (EEM), a globally accessible, outsourced messaging solution which integrates with existing e-mail, PBX, and Centrex systems. Combining voice mail, fax, wireless, and e-mail messaging, blue-silicon's mid-source service extends the reach of service providers and telecom interconnects, offering them messaging solutions that will increase recurring revenues and offer new benefits to their business customers. "blue-silicon delivers what Extended Enterprise Messaging promises, including that which unified messaging has failed to deliver -- a globally accessible outsourced messaging service with proven integration to existing PBX and Centrex systems," said Samuel Williams, blue-silicon's VP of marketing.

As you'll read in Erez Marom's article in this section, "Unified Communications For Everyone," unified communications in enterprises simplifies messaging on both sides: sending and receiving. As more sophisticated capabilities are integrated into existing packages, business productivity will increase as workgroups find it easier to collaborate on projects.

Furthermore, Walter Rolandi discusses the role of virtual assistants in his piece, "Speaking Of UM." More than auto-attendants, personal virtual assistants do everything from support calendar queries to voice dialing to ad hoc conference calls. Clearly the playing field for unified messaging is changing. Gear up your business and get ready to take advantage of some cutting-edge technologies.

BY EREZ MAROM

The opinions of industry experts differ on whether the growth in unified communications will come from large or small companies. But they agree on one thing: unified communications, the next extension of unified messaging, is ready to explode in the next five years. This phenomenon is fueled, in part, by the exceptional growth of the business use of e-mail and wireless communications.

While unified messaging, as a business tool, has been the province of larger organizations with advanced IT departments, the convergence of media and the adoption of IP and other standards will soon change all that. Even the one-person office will have access to the communications capabilities of the Fortune 500. New products and the growing cast of companies using them will level the business playing field by improving communication and collaboration within and among companies of any size.

Today's business people are wired. The list of devices and services available to them continues to grow. However, the ability to stay in touch, rather than becoming easier, has ironically become more complex and difficult.

AN ANSWER TO THE COMPLEXITY
Unified communications is the ability to maintain and manage two-way communications, receiving and sending messages, using multiple services on any device, anywhere, anytime. In addition, it is associated with "one number" follow-me services and the ability to personalize message management with filtering, routing, notification, prioritization, and artificial intelligence.

Unified communications is however, expensive and impractical for small businesses to implement on their own. Even the adoption of unified messaging -- typically a universal mailbox for inbound communications -- in large enterprises has been hampered by the multiplicity of devices, services, legacy systems, and proprietary solutions. However, businesses of all sizes will soon have access to unified communications services without the large investment previously required.

A WORLD OF SERVICES
New companies with unified communications products are enabling a new class of service provider that will integrate and manage unified communications for their subscribers large and small. Some unified communications companies offer service providers standards-based, carrier-class platforms that integrate access to the PSTN, cellular, and IP worlds. With these products, service providers will be able to provision services with relative ease and subscribers will be able to customize the services to meet their needs.

Small businesses will particularly benefit from a robust suite of unified communications services that give them one- number service combining telephone, cellular, fax, single messaging service, e-mail, and voice mail. Just as important, subscribers will be able to able to listen to e-mail while driving their cars, respond by voice instantly, or forward the message to a computer or cell phone where it can be read to the recipient using text-to-speech technology.

These capabilities will also be combined with presence management, chat, and instant messaging. The sender will know the availability of the intended recipient and use the best means to contact them, whether office phone, cell phone, pager, e-mail, or instant message. In this scenario, one gets a truly unified communications capability that facilitates collaboration within and among workgroups, wherever their members may be or whatever device they may be using.

Erez Marom is the co-founder and CEO of CTI2, with U.S. headquarters in Burlington, MA. 

[ Return To The Top ]
[ Return To The November 2000 Table Of Contents ]

BY WALTER ROLANDI, Ph.D 

Unified messaging is an idea whose time has come. The advantages of being able to consult a single source to obtain voice messages, e-mail, faxes, and pager information are obvious, particularly for the mobile professional. A number of companies now provide unified messaging solutions that enable their users to interactively obtain all manner of messages by telephone.

But how should one interact with one's unified messaging solution? While some people don't seem to mind pressing "one" for this or "two" for that, many others have grown impatient with traditional interactive voice response (IVR) systems. Telephones were created to enable conversational dialog between people. After generations of cultural practice speaking with each other by phone, it's not surprising that many of us resist using them as primitive data entry terminals.

The natural way to obtain one's messages would be by voice. Great strides have been made in speech recognition and text-to-speech technologies over the past 15 years. Taking advantage of these developments, the UM market seems to be rapidly adopting voice user interfaces (VUI). VUIs can range from small grammar, keyword recognition systems ("Read messages") all the way up to mixed initiative conversational dialog systems ("How about reading me my first urgent e-mail message from Fred Miller?").

Although the speech application industry is expanding dramatically, it is too soon to know what interactive characteristics users will demand of applications in the UM market. As more users are exposed to effective, easy-to-use speech applications, the UM industry will probably come to take speech interfaces for granted. When this occurs, the question will no longer be whether users will prefer to use voice to interact with their message stores, but rather what sort of other things might they also want to do by voice.

A few companies have already begun to answer that question by offering "virtual assistant" type products. Most virtual assistant applications allow users to dial in from any phone and access voice mails and e-mail using voice commands. Others support additional features like calendar queries, appointment reminders, weather reports, news reports, and stock quotes. More advanced virtual assistants also provide advanced telephony features such as voice dialing and on-the-fly conference calls. Voice interaction abilities vary widely across these applications, from command and control keyword recognition approaches to full scale natural language processing (NLP).

The virtual assistant phenomenon is probably here to stay. Continuing advances in NLP and speech recognition technologies are going to allow virtual assistant creators to push man-to-machine dialog closer and closer to human-to-human standards. Moreover, users tend to attribute personality characteristics to their virtual assistants. This tendency may eventually drive a market requirement that conversation with one's virtual assistant be more personal, entertaining, and even delightful!

Walter Rolandi, Ph.D. is director of applied research for Conita Technologies, Inc.

[ Return To The Top ]
[ Return To The November 2000 Table Of Contents ]