Unified Communications Continue to Evolve
by Melisa LaBancz-Bleasdale
The concept of unified communications (UC) and unified messaging (UM) has been well received, yet the financial resources required to implement related solutions has hindered actual implementation and adoption. "There is a demand, but not as much for Voice over IP (VoIP), for example. Market demand for UM solutions is not coming from the solutions themselves, but from pain points that they address," observes Enterprise Communications and ICT Industry Analyst Krithi Rao with Frost & Sullivan. These pain points include too many crucial business message modes (email, voicemail, fax) and convenient and immediate access from one point - either a phone, the email client or a web-based interface.
Although UC and UM are now well-known terms, they enjoy a host of different definitions- depending on who's talking. Todd Tatum, product manager for Cisco Unified Messaging uses the traditional industry definition of UC, "the market space that brings together UM, confer-commencing, collaboration, mobility and call control into a single s u i te of complimentary applications." He further defines UM, a subcomponent of UC in a similarly straightforward manner, "the ability to store emails, voicemails and faxes in a single message store with access from a single client. "Both of these definitions seem to resonate with the market.
"Cisco UM is growing at a very rapid rate," says Tatum, "Cisco has literally thousands of UM customers and millions of mailboxes sold. All types of organizations can benefit from the productivity enhancements provided by UM." The Cisco Unity UM solution provides users with the ability to check email, voice and fax messages over a telephone from any location using the Microsoft Outlook inbox, or a browser-based interface. The same features utilized to manage email can be employed for voice and fax messages, enabling users to apply one set of rules and filters to all messages, regardless of type.
Collaborative Elements
Taking the definition of UC one step further, Jive Software, a company focused on next generation collaboration tools, highlights the collaborative component of UC. Jive CTO Matt Tucker says, "We like to use the term unified collaboration to describe the product area on which we focus. To us, this means the combination of voice, presence, instant messaging, email, blogs and even wiki documents."
Jive's product line falls into two major categories: real-time and community collaboration. Their Clearspace tool addresses community collaboration by bringing files, blogs, discussions, IM, and wiki documents together onto one customizable web page. Openfire and Spark offer a solution for real-time communications. Spark is an open source, cross-platform, Real-Time Communications (RTC) Client that can be centrally managed from the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP)-based Openfire 3.2 server to provide secure, built-in group chat, voice, and telephony integration. Using Openfire 3.2, voice calls can be initiated from one party's computer to another via the chat client. The connection uses VoIP technology. It is designed to support more than 30,000 user connections simultaneously and is billed as the first enterprise application to utilize the Jingle* protocol, although it also integrates with existing phone systems that use Session Initiated Protocol (SIP).
"Jive software is unique in the space in that we're building out a solution using open source and open standards," explains Tucker. "That combination is proving to be a powerfully competitive tool." Tucker believes anyone in the market for a UM solution will focus first on features, but that open standards should be a key factor in the evaluation. "Open standards prevent vendor lockin, enable federation with customers and partners, and drives innovation in the market."
Tucker notes that one company talking a lot about open standards is Microsoft, who, he feels, has taken their "traditional embrace then extend" approach to standards in the UM/UC space by implementing many proprietary extensions. "That makes interoperability and federation very difficult, which customers shouldn't tolerate."
IT Driven
Adomo, an organization that delivers next generation voice messaging and communications/ mobility applications for complex telephony environments approaches UM by looking at the big picture. "UM has been around a while" says Bob Schoettle, marketing consultant to Adomo. "You can look back ten plus years and find varying degrees of acceptance. I think that's largely because it's been a creative, IT driven thing-'Oh we'll put these systems together and won't it be cool, you'll get voicemails in your email!' The main difference today is that UM is centered in mobility. There is a new set of users who fundamentally operate in a different way."
The newest generation of the company's messaging solution, Adomo 6.0, delivers what it calls "the wow benefits of unified communications" --by providing IT departments with an easy IP voice messaging migration approach for integrating into an existing infrastructure. Adomo 6.0 contains new features that include SmartMobility capabilities aimed at making users more productive and effective. The product also includes architecture and system management enhancements meant to expedite and facilitate enterprise deployments for IT departments.
Cary FitzGerald, vice president of engineering and product management at Adomo notes, "We have an extremely lowtouch model for deployment. We don't require extensive schema changes, we don't require there to be a client. We can deploy the Adomo capability on top of Exchange very easily. Because Exchange can be fairly expensive to operate, there's a tremendous need or desire to go to a centralized implementation. The difficulty is that if you have a distributed communications system where your PBX branches out-a very common implementation-when your data network goes down, then things like call answer aren't going to work."
Adomo 6.0 addresses this challenge by providing critical voice messaging functionality that survives on the network. Users can still read and listen to voicemail as Adomo stores the last three days' worth of voicemail directly on the appliance. When the network comes back up, Adomo reconciles the state of the messages stored with the centralized Exchange server. "That's a key differentiator for us," adds FitzGerald. "In fact, when we look at our relationship with Microsoft, it's actually something that helps Microsoft deploy Exchange. Adomo 6.0 can create an architecture much more resilient to outages."
Adomo's SmartMobility provides BlackBerry "Play on Phone", a distinctive solution to a common business challenge: The majority of BlackBerry devices currently in use are not capable of playing a voice message attached to an email. Adomo 6.0 lets users select a menu option on the BlackBerry email client to initiate a telephone call from the Adomo system to the user's phone, which when answered, is queued to the chosen message in voicemail.
Continuing to Evolve
With many new options to choose from, customers are weighing immediate cost against long-term ROI. Rao says she has seen some increase in demand for UM due to the way vendors are packaging their solutions, (providing options and modularity), as well as the availability of different deployment models. However, unilateral adoption hasn't yet taken hold. "Honestly, UM hasn't taken off that well. However, I expect that to change, because most customers are accepting of the technologies, plus vendors are positioning UM as part of a bigger UC strategy."
Rao feels that the UM market is headed to replace the voice messaging market, but not with like for like deployment of UM capabilities. "Where everyone used to have voicemail and were similar users, the UM space will be marked with UM-enabled systems that support different types of users - from voicemail only to the power users with mobile access to enterprise capabilities." She believes that as new modes of communication, and new devices continue to appear, UM will continue to evolve, but adds, "My opinion is that the evolution of UM solutions is happening faster than its adoption, to the point where some users may just skip that evolution phase altogether." MB/TMP