Unified Messaging-Enabled Voice Messaging Drives Adoption in the Enterprise Markets

Frost: North America. Unified messaging (UM) system vendors are gearing up to meet the potential increase in demand as well as combat challenges associated with enhancing voice messaging in the enterprise markets. Vendors are attempting to present a highly verifiable business case to convince customers of the application’s benefits and illustrate its benefits when compared to the functions of legacy messaging systems.Revenues in this industry totaled $569.1 million in 2004 and can reach $1.21 billion in 2011.

The value proposition offered by UM is that it allows employees to access their e-mail, voicemail, and fax messages from a single interface at any time and from anywhere, thus increasing the productivity of the work force. Therefore, slowly but steadily, customers are becoming convinced about the benefits of upgrading to UM technology from mere voice messaging, to save time and increase revenues.UM is a relatively new technology and is slowly getting set to replace the reliable and robust legacy voice messaging (VM) technology. The path to adoption is being made easy due to the coincidence of a huge rush of replacement of telephony messaging systems that were installed during the 1990s in preparation of the Y2K, and are due for lease termination or are obsolete.

To successfully penetrate the market and attain product maturity, UM vendors are retaining and/or including the prominent features of first-generation messaging systems into their second-generation UM/VM systems to provide a diverse array of capabilities, thus ensuring a smooth migration strategy.

With UM having a limited target market currently, vendors are learning to increase the value proposition of the solution either by bundling it with a larger enterprise application, or by integrating other capabilities into the UM solution.

Enterprise application participants are combining UM capabilities with their core enterprise offerings such as collaboration solutions, and in recent cases, routers. Most messaging vendors bundle automated attendant capabilities at the basic price of the messaging solution. Some vendors bundle access to calendars and schedules as part of the UM solution.

North American Enterprise Voice and Unified Messaging Platform Markets

Publ 20051213