Business application services delivered by ASPs are still in their
infancy and there are concerns that the market is not growing as
fast as many expected. But, says Katy Ring, the software and
service industry is overlooking the rising penetration of unified
messaging services in the corporate community
Adoption of messaging ASP services
E-mail requires
minimal customisation and is inherently network-based, so it is
ideally suited to ASP implementations. It is therefore not
surprising that e-mail has been the most successful ASP application
so far. There have been two kinds of solution:
1. Numerous ASPs have introduced e-mail services based on
Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes, which take the form of the
standard enterprise e-mail application operated from an
Internet-based data centre. Examples of these ASPs are Vistorm,
FutureLink, Interliant, Telecomputing and USinternetworking
2. E-mail service providers have introduced special
outsourced e-mail services for enterprises on their mass-market
e-mail platforms. Major service providers in this category include
Critical Path, PSINet and USA.net
Enterprises of all sizes have decided to outsource their e-mail,
including Bechtel and United Airlines at the large end of the
scale. Other businesses, such as Federal Express, have retained
their internal e-mail in-house, but outsourced their external
e-mail.
Unified messaging services are the obvious next step
A
large number of business users and consumers can now obtain unified
messaging services, enabling them to manage all of their messages
from a single device using a single interface. These services are
available from a range of providers, including mobile phone
operators, portal operators and telcos. Moreover, the ASPs
 | | "ASPs have been successful,
primarily with enterprises of up to 50 people, where integration
with existing e-mail systems is not a major issue"
| | | | | |
| | Source: Ovum | | |
|
|
are producing a new class of unified messaging services targeted at
the central IT and telecoms departments of enterprises, for use by
part or all of the workforce.
Unified messaging (UM) services can also be extended to form a more
sophisticated set of services known as unified communications (UC),
which add realtime capabilities to unified messaging.
Most UM/UC services adopted by businesses have been provided by
UM/UC specialists, such as j2, Linx, Premiere and Webley. These
companies have been successful, primarily with enterprises of up to
50 people, where integration with existing e-mail systems is not a
major issue.
There are a handful of large enterprises worldwide that use
enterprise UM/UC services. One such enterprise is the Australian
Department of Social Services, which uses a service provided by
Telstra, using Lucent's (Avaya's) Unified Messenger for Service
Providers platform.
What is unified messaging/unified communications (UM/UC)?
Unified messaging
Four principal types of
store-and-forward message are in widespread use over communications
networks: e-mail, voicemail, SMS and fax. A large number of people
now make regular use of all four messaging types for both business
and personal purposes. In many cases, they have multiple stores for
some types, so managing and interrelating them increasingly becomes
a burden. With unified messaging, multiple message stores can be
accessed from a single, unified in-box. The principal classes of UM
service are:
Internet voice messaging - the ability to access and reply
to e-mail and voicemail from a PC
Audible text messaging - the ability to access and reply to
voicemail and e-mail (or at least information about e-mails), and
other text messages from a phone
Bidirectional unified messaging - the ability to access and
reply to voicemail, e-mail and faxes (and possibly SMS) from either
a PC or a phone.
Unified communications
We use the term "unified
communications" (UC) to refer to services that encompass:
1. Unified messaging functions
2. Direct access to outbound calling
functions
A unified communications service is also likely to include a
"personal assistant" interface. A personal assistant provides
facilities for personal information management, including
address/phone books and calendar, and enables users to customise
their interface with the communications services.
By combining messaging functionality with call control, UC services
can offer features such as:
1. Instant callback from voicemail and e-mail
2. Accessibility management
3. Directory-enabled dialling
Why is UM/UC poised to become the killer ASP
solution?
The volume of messages that enterprise workers
need to handle continues to increase rapidly, and the messages
themselves are increasingly crucial to the way that many of us
work. However, workers are also becoming less bound to one desk,
working instead at a series of separate locations, or on the move.
Enterprises therefore have a growing need to provide workers with
constant access to messages and to make workers easily accessible,
whatever their location. The benefits that UM/UC can bring in this
situation make it an attractive business proposition.
However, the obstacle to UM/UC adoption has been the challenge of
integrating UM/UC with the array of existing voice and e-mail
solutions that most enterprises have in place. Few installed
messaging standards support inter-working with other systems, so
the only way for an enterprise to implement UM/UC has been to
replace all of its existing messaging systems. Not only does this
demand a substantial capital investment, it also represents a major
project for stretched IT departments to undertake. Many enterprises
have decided that the cost and effort of implementing UM/UC in the
short term are just too great.
For this reason, ASPs have a strong market message to present. This
is because, by moving to ASP-delivered messaging services, an
enterprise avoids many of the capital costs and much of the
migration effort that replacing messaging systems would normally
entail.