Unified messaging to become ubiquitous, says Frost & Sullivan

Unified messaging – the technology that facilitates anywhere, anytime non-real-time messaging – will become pervasive, driven by businesses seeking new ways to improve workforce productivity and efficiency. That’s the analysis from analyst and market researcher Frost & Sullivan. Research analyst Alaa Saayed says that although the UM market may not have produced impressive revenues last year, it has certainly made an impression on end-users. From being considered a nice-to-have application, UM has graduated into the must-have class, he says. Accepting that so far, UM has enjoyed limited success, due to the effort and cost of adding UM infrastructure, which outweighed potential benefits, he insists that will change. “While the deployments of advanced UC [unified communications] solutions are currently limited to corporate customers, full-blown UM solutions that offer much more than just a single interface access to email, VM, and fax, are widely available and ready to deploy,” he explains. “Today, a second-generation UM license includes calendar access, find me/follow me [call routing], mobile access to corporate messages, video messages, speech technologies, live call management, and even presence capabilities,” continues Saayed. That’s despite the hype surrounding UC, which includes UM as an integral part of a comprehensive IP (Internet protocol) communications solution.