We live in a world where messages are sent en masse to our business computer, home PC, mobile phone and voicemail.
Unified messaging is being hailed as the answer to our prayers, but the jury is still out on whether there's a business case for this technology.
Messages! They're come in the form of SMS, fax, by post of delivered to us as crumpled bits of paper on our desks. Some messages we find, others we forget and many never find their way to us at all.
Unified messaging, hailed as the answer to our prayers, is becoming more and more intelligent.
It allows us to direct all modes of communication to one mailbox in cyberspace, accessible from a mobile phone or Web browser.
Some systems will even contact you when a message has arrived, convert text to speech and read an email to you over your phone. Others allow you to respond using advanced speech recognition.
Sounds great, but the jury is still out on the business case for unified messaging.
Local company Iocom is the Australasian and south-east Asian distributor of a new unified messaging solution, alexis.
alexis runs on a standard Windows NT/2000 server, MS Exchange 5.5 and MS Outlook and was developed by US-based COM2001.
COM2001 has shipped almost 300 systems in three years, with 25-500 users on each system, according to COM2001 president and co-founder, David Perez.
Roll up, roll out
In Australia, uptake expectations are "fairly modest" according to Iocom CTI manager, Damen Crowe.
Iocom anticipates rolling out 30-40 systems a month within three to six months.
From a productivity point of view, "there's a lot of dead time on a weekly basis sitting in traffic and travelling interstate," Crowe said. "At what equates to a dollar a day, it's not an expensive solution at all."
Costing AU$30 to AU$45 per user, per month, companies should see a return on investment in four to 18 months, according to Crowe.
Whilst Telstra's OneNumber service (formerly known as Telepath) is a precursor to unified messaging in the sense that you can get phone calls wherever you are, the telco giant says a more intelligent messaging system isn't a priority for now.
Telstra says the business plan for unified messaging still has to be approved and is "continually being assessed in light of other business cases and priorities".
"The environment in Telstra is one of carefully prioritising and looking at cost," Telstra's public affairs manager of online services, Stuart Gray said.
"Telstra's certainly committed to unified messaging," but Gray added that there's no way of guaranteeing that the business case would be approved in this half of the year.
alexis's competitors, such as jfax, mbox and some telcos offer rudimentary entry-level platforms in comparison, according to Microsoft's messaging product manager, John Wilcox.
Many have attempted to consolidate all messages onto a telephone system that isn't integrated with the desktop environment or only loosely integrated.
With the greatest productivity centred around the desktop it's "much more natural and effective to bring voicemail into the email structure," Wilcox said.
