A single business transaction has many elements and as
technology broadens the audit trail becomes more
convoluted.
The telephone was the first electronic device to fragment
traditional mail communications and since then we have seen the
rise of fax, e-mail, instant messaging, digital telephony and
teleconferencing.
Tightening regulations regarding corporate governance are
increasingly forcing companies to unify their messaging systems and
fill in the cracks in the audit trail of a transaction. Combined
with the prescribed timescales for retention of information, the
new regulations are increasing the amount of storage space tied up
by historical records.
Regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel 2 are deemed to
cover textual information in e-mails, but attention is being drawn
to instant messaging. Companies with an eye to the future are also
looking to store recorded voicemails and, as voice over Internet
Protocol (VoIP) telephony becomes more widespread, complete
telephone calls will be added to the storage burden.
It has yet to be tested in court, but governance regulations may
already be deemed to cover all forms of messaging. Sarbanes Oxley
refers to the need to store “digital records” and VoIP voicemail or
telephony recordings are digital in nature.
The problem with storing complete calls is that they also have
to be indexed. Voice recognition technology is improving but there
is a resistance to trusting it as a reliable conversion method.
Paul Cheslaw, vice-president and general manager of unified
messaging specialist AVST, believes that this will come as unified
messaging evolves into what he calls unified communications.
“Unified messaging will become a component of a unified
communications portfolio,” he says. “Other applications that you
would typically find joining fax, voicemail and e-mail would be
teleconferencing, instant messaging and collaboration technology.
This would be supplemented by integration into business
applications. When a salesperson comes out of a sales call, they
would call up the unified communications server and enter the
details of the call into, for example, Salesforce.com.”
Storing complete calls for transaction records is being avoided
except in financial dealing rooms, but this does not mean that
voice is being totally ignored. Voicemail recovery on the move is
becoming an area of extreme interest.
“For a long time voicemail was looked at as a nice-to-have not a
must-have,” says Cheslaw. “Now that e-mail has become so pervasive
and people are spending so much time with their e-mail open on
their desktops, they are beginning to understand the benefits
unified messaging offers to both desktop and mobile users. Even
Microsoft is building an element of unified messaging into its next
generation of the Exchange product.”
Microsoft’s launch of the Vista operating system and Office 2007
suite will bring collaborative working into the mainstream next
year and elements of this may be considered crucial to good
governance. Microsoft’s Exchange Server 2007 for 64-bit x86
architected servers will also use Exchange Unified Messaging (EUM)
to break down some of the current barriers.
The new servers will store many types of messages in a single
inbox alongside traditional e-mail. Using the Outlook 2007
interface, users will be able to retrieve e-mail, voicemail and
faxes. Any of these messages will be available to searches or may
be forwarded to other users.
EUM will also support Outlook web access and remote working will
be supported through improved services in Exchange Activesync to
push messages directly to mobile devices.
Combining the telephone and the computer has been a dream of the
industry since 1984. ICL, a UK mainframe maker later taken over by
Fujitsu Services, was the first to attempt some kind of
integration. Working with Sinclair, better known as a home computer
manufacturer, the company produced a computer based on a modified
Sinclair QL motherboard with an integral telephone and modem. This
was marketed as the ICL One-Per-Desk and also rebadged as the BT
Merlin Tonto.
The product did not sell well because it did little more than
allow numbers to be dialled via the computer. Incoming calls could
be answered by a synthesised voice but messages could not be
recorded. It did, however, open many suppliers’ eyes to future
possibilities.
It was not until the mid-1990s that unified messaging really
took off. Cheslaw says unified messaging was first developed in the
UK by a company created by Imperial College, called Vmail, but the
company was bought by VMX in 1993, a US company that eventually
emerged as Avaya after being the subject of a chain of
acquisitions.
Avaya was a leader in the VoIP world, but the market has become
very competitive and Siemens and Alcatel are currently leading in
the European market, according to Shomik Bannerjee, an analyst at
Frost & Sullivan.
“The VoIP market is growing rapidly. In fact, far more quickly
than the manufacturers expected but in line with the more
optimistic predictions of analysts. There are two reasons for this.
One is the replacement cycle. Most companies bought new PBX systems
near to the millennium because of worries about Y2K issues. The
replacement cycle of seven years is coming to a close now and
equipment is being replaced.
“The second is that through 2002 to 2003 we had a very bad phase
where the GDP was growing incredibly slowly. Replacement activities
were postponed but now, with the economy reviving in most parts of
Europe, there is renewed activity to buy new hardware and
software.
“Initial scepticism on what should replace the existing
infrastructure has changed and the telecommunications landscape has
evolved as better products have become available and prices have
dropped. It is now accepted that IP is going to become the
networking protocol for telecoms.”
There is a misconception that storing voicemail will bloat
storage systems but the figures contradict this. Barry Butler, a
senior analyst at Juniper Research, says the average increase in
storage is minimal. “I have been told that the typical one-minute
voicemail message takes up 100Kbytes of storage. The incremental
impact on mail servers on top of the current e-mail and attachment
storage space is usually less than 5%,” he says.
AVST’s Call¬Xpress product shows a similar light touch.
“Typically we use a .wav file, a G.711 codec. This records at 8kbps
so one minute of storage would be 480Kbytes,” says Cheslaw.
Extrapolating that out to 1,500 users, each with a one-minute voice
message and all of the overheads for storing their names and
greetings messages, takes 720Mbytes of space, according to figures
from AVST. So the additional requirements for one of these systems
can be fairly minimal, and a lot can be fitted into 1Gbyte.
The decision of where to store new data is made easier because
any current storage, local Raid, storage area network, network
attached storage or even a standard attached disc would be
suitable. Quality of service is not a problem because this can be
handled by most of the current crop of IP switches. In fact, the
only problem, according to Cheslaw, is where to locate data.
“We are finding that it is critical to give businesses the
option of where they store e-mails, faxes, voice and other data.
Because of compliance issues we are finding that our users are
split into two camps. Some say that they absolutely must have their
voicemail stored with their e-mails to make it discoverable and
easier to back up. An equal number do not want to have everything
stored together and discoverable. It depends on the philosophy of
the individual companies,” he says.
For the time being, apart from ensuring sufficient capacity,
storage does not appear to cause any more of a headache than e-mail
but as unified messaging expands to encompass videomails and
teleconferencing, streaming will become an issue.
Storage suppliers are beginning to target the demands of large
file storage and streaming data. For example, Isilon Systems uses
clustered storage for data-intensive business applications and
clustered computing environments. Companies that need this tend to
be in oil, gas, media and internet services, but the advent of
mainstream online conferencing will create new potential users.
“The issues start to come into play in larger enterprises, both
in terms of capacity and concurrency. Thousands of employees not
only scale the volume of data but also the number of simultaneous
accesses,” says Jeff Alsford, EMEA region technical director at
Isilon.
“Conventional file systems may become restricted by the volume
of read and write data. Isilon’s clustered approach scales both
read and write capability linearly maintaining the
capacity/throughput relationship.”
Perhaps one of the biggest users of such expanded unified
messaging services would be the call centre. The advice offered by
the helpdesk is critical and, especially if customers are involved,
has to be closely monitored for quality.
“The biggest factor to be considered here is regulation, with
companies required to keep records for months and sometimes years.
Here the need for a highly scalable storage solution becomes very
obvious,” says Alsford.