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Evaluating unified messaging solutions

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CIOL Bureau
Updated On
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Elizabeth Collinge with inputs from Lisa Pierce

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Giga’s Position

Unified messaging (UM) solutions vary widely in functionality, maturity and

technology. By selecting the right UM solution, an enterprise can increase
employee productivity and achieve greater customer satisfaction - both of which

will result in increased profitability.

Giga believes that UM services are best suited to serve the needs of mobile

professionals and will ultimately prove superior to customer-owned and operated

premise-based UM products. However, the UM services market is extremely immature

today. Robust UM services will not be available from large, established

telecommunications carriers until the end of 2002.

Thus, some clients are taking trial drive of UM products during the interim.

In selecting an UM solution, companies must evaluate both the supplier and the

product/service. Key evaluation criteria for a supplier include viability,

experience, breadth of products/services offered, customer service and support.

Pertinent UM product or service evaluation criteria include in-box access

methods, outbox functionality, integration with, and support for, legacy

systems, scalability, geographic availability and additional capabilities.

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Proof/Notes

UM solutions increase the accessibility and responsiveness of mobile professionals by providing a single point from which voice mail, e-mail and

facsimile messages may be accessed and managed. Giga believes clients should
seek the most robust and complete solution possible. However, since the

requirements of each enterprise are different, clients should weigh the criteria

in order of importance when conducting an evaluation.

Click here to view image.

Supplier Evaluation Criteria





Viability


The economic downturn in the past year has made careful evaluation of supplier

viability more critical than ever. In the case of UM products vendor failure
means customer support ceases and product upgrades are impossible. For UM
services, provider failure could result in abrupt cessation of services, leaving

mobile professionals without access to messages. Important factors contributing

to viability include the following:


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Age reflects endurance. Many businesses that are destined to fail will do so

within the first three years.

Financial stability, easily assessed for publicly held suppliers, is

essential. A supplier with strong, consistent leadership by experienced

individuals has far greater odds of survival, than suppliers and management

which lacks experience.

In contrast, a supplier with low viability will be unlikely to attract and

retain the quality of staff necessary to sell and support a quality solution.

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Experience

Supplier experience should include management and staff with a background in

messaging, telecommunications and collaboration products. In the case of UM
services, clients should only consider those providers with experience serving

enterprise customers. In fact, for both products and services, clients should

request references from users of comparable size, with similar messaging

requirements.

Breadth of Portfolio

In general, suppliers offering a broader range of products or services will

demonstrate a greater degree of experience and increased viability, since
survival is not dependent on the success of a single product line. Cisco is

a notable example: Not only are UM and unified communications products part of

Cisco’s broad portfolio of products, but the vendor also seems to be trying to

cover all aspects of the UM market.

The company purchased Active Voice for incorporation into the AVVID

product line, teamed with Mirapoint to offer a unified communications

product for service providers and teamed with CMG to provide UM to mobile

carriers. In addition, a source at Telcordia has revealed that Cisco’s

uOne is among the most widely requested platforms for UM implementations in

which Telcordia acts as systems integrator.

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However, if the broad a product line is too broad it can lead to

under-investment, resulting in inferior UM solutions. It is likely that

suppliers with extensive product lines may not focus on the success of their own

UM solution in the same manner as a supplier for which UM is a core competency.

Captaris (formerly AVT) is an example of more narrowly focused vendor

succeeding in the UM product market.

Customer Service and Support

Adequate training is essential for clients purchasing premise-based UM

products. User guides and manuals should be available via the Web or in hard
copy. For products, personalized training and several months of free support

should be available to network administrators. UM services should have a

24x7-call center to provide telephone support for end users. Ideally, both

products and services should include customer service and support via the Web,

e-mail, phone/voice mail and fax.

Product/Service Evaluation Criteria






In-box Access Methods


The primary driver behind UM adoption is the ability to provide mobile

professionals with easy access to messages and faxes anytime, anywhere,
regardless of what device they are using. Therefore, clients should seek UM

solutions with the widest variety of in-box access methods. Telephone and e-mail

access is essential.

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Telephone access should include speech recognition, text-to-speech and

speech-to-text features. Email access should be available from both the e-mail

client and the Web. Support for Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and pagers

are also desirable.

While vendors often tout the time saving, users achieve by accessing a single

in-box, Giga believes this alone is an inconsequential benefit of UM. Most

office-bound users with ready access to both their telephones and PCs do not

require unified messaging. It is likely that the time they may save will not

increase their productivity by any measurable extent. However, the ability to

view and respond to messages easily while on the road can make a world of

difference to sales executives and field service technicians and also to their

employers.

Out-box Functionality

UM’s ability to manage and respond to messages effectively provides the

greatest value to users. Users should be able to create, delete, send and
forward all types of messages easily from any device. For example, upon receipt

of an urgent message, a user may choose to send a response from a wireless phone

by dictating an e-mail via speech-to-text technology or may issue a spoken

command that initiates a telephone call to the message sender. Upon completion

of the conversation, the user can opt to return to the in-box and listen to the

remaining messages.

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Integration With/Support for Legacy Systems

Enterprise customers can use two distinct architectures to provide unified

messaging capabilities, as follows:

1. An integrated architecture that provides a front end to stand-alone legacy

systems

2. A truly unified single-store database and modular server topologies UM

products that use a truly unified, single-store architecture are well suited for

clients with green field operations or locations, since they provide the ease of

administration inherent in a single directory and message store. Centrinity’s

FirstClass is an example of an UM product with a truly unified architecture. In

contrast, an integrated architecture provides connectivity between stand-alone

legacy systems by replicating faxes and voice mail messages in an e-mail-based

in-box. Most UM products support Microsoft Exchange, a dozen support Lotus

Notes, but others use their own e-mail-based in-box as the point of integration.

Thus, integrated architectures are typically e-mail-centric, while unified

topologies provide greater balance between data-centric and voice-centric

messaging applications.

While a truly unified single-store topology provides greater functionality, most

customers prefer to maximize their current infrastructure investment. Thus,

clients who opt for the integrated architectures to support legacy systems not

only face reduced functionality, but they also must perform a careful assessment

of UM features and how they work.

Given customer preference for legacy systems, Giga anticipates enterprise

customer adoption of truly unified architectures will not become prevalent until

the second half of this decade.

Scalability

The ease with which a UM solution will be able to grow as new users are

added is particularly important to clients with expectations of growth or those
that anticipate merger or acquisition activity. While UM services from providers

should easily scale to support many thousands of users, UM products allow far

fewer simultaneous users. Therefore, clients must carefully consider the future

needs of the enterprise when selecting a premise-based UM product.

Geographic Availability

Geographic availability is not a major consideration for an enterprise with

mobile users who travel within a single region. However, many enterprises
conduct business from widely dispersed locations. Premise-based UM products may

require that users call into their "home" location to retrieve

messages; at best, an UM product with multi-site networking will require that

users dial into the nearest location.

UM services often have points of presence (POPs) in many locations, providing

local/toll-free access that can save money in long-distance charges. Therefore,

the number and location of POPs can prove a major differentiator when evaluating

an UM service.

Additional Capabilities

Additional messaging and telephony features available in some UM solutions

include the following:

Compatibility with existing private branch exchange (PBX), centrex or key

system.

Multi-site networking: Message notification integration with phone

message-waiting lamp or stutter dial. Variable/programmable message

notification. Variable message retrieval (time of day, automatic number

identification (ANI), type of message, urgent messages) Playback (reverse, pause

and fast-forward through voice mail)

Ability to append voice annotations to e-mail or fax. Calling line

identification (CLID)/ANI/dialed number identification service (DNIS) routing

CLID to e-mail Auto-attendant and programmable forward/follow-me

Permission/restriction tables Compatibility with e-mail or PBX security features

Vendors such as Captaris are beginning to include unified messaging as part of a

larger suite of solutions intended to make a variety of enterprise applications,

such as customer relationship management (CRM) and sales force automation (SFA),

available to mobile professionals.

However, Giga does not believe that the availability of mobile enterprise

application platforms alone is enough to influence one’s choice of UM vendor

(see IdeaByte, Mobile Professional Productivity and Mobile Enterprise

Applications Are Distinct Markets, Carl Zetie).

Instead, a broader perspective is required. The table below lists provider

and product/service evaluation criteria, the factors that are considered in

each, characteristics of enterprises to which the criteria are particularly

important and recommendations, such as whether the criteria applies more

strongly when considering service from a provider or a premise-based product.

The supplier evaluation criteria are closely linked to one another and are

important to all clients, regardless of whether a product or service is being

evaluated.

Unified Messaging Evaluation Checklist

Click here for table.

Alternative View

Continued immaturity in the unified messaging services market will make it

impossible for clients to perform extensive comparative evaluations. In this
case, to differentiate among UM services from various providers, clients will be

forced to focus on in-box functionality, out-box functionality and availability;

alternatively, they may elect to use UM products.

Findings & Recommendations

The majority of Giga clients should wait until unified messaging is

available from large established service providers before deploying UM services
to mobile employees. Since enterprise-class UM services are relatively scarce,

clients interested in UM now will be most successful conducting limited trials

of premise-based products from established vendors.

Assuming equal viability and experience among vendors of customer owned and

operated premise-based products, product functionality, integration with legacy

systems and breadth of product portfolio will be the deciding factors in

selecting a UM product.

However, given the volatility of the current service provider landscape, it

is unlikely that the viability of UM service providers will be equal. Therefore,

viability and experience will be of utmost importance when selecting an UM

service, followed by functionality and geographic availability.

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