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North American Enterprise Messaging Markets
Frost & Sullivan, Aug 2004
Convincing Return on Investment Model Required to Popularize Unified Messaging Solutions
The end-user perception of unified messaging (UM) as a high-priced technology is overshadowing its significant contribution to enterprise productivity. For instance, UM offers employees the convenience of accessing e-mail, voicemail, and fax messages through a single interface - resulting in time savings and ultimately, increased revenue. Since the benefits are not easily quantifiable and the technology is relatively new, presenting a viable business case to push UM adoption is likely to be a significant challenge. In future, a combination of factors including awareness campaigns and increasing compatibility with existing voicemail and e-mail packages are expected to drive growth in the UM market.
This Frost & Sullivan research examines the North American enterprise messaging market with an emphasis on UM solutions. It also discusses the significant market challenges, drivers, and restraints that UM vendors face and provides strategic recommendations for them to increase their presence and profitability in the enterprise UM space.
Increasing Deployments of IP Telephony Drive Adoption of UM Systems
Migration of enterprises toward an Internet protocol (IP) infrastructure is a major driving force for the UM market. In addition to offering end users potential cost-savings, the transition to IP also benefits UM vendors in terms of easier integration over a converged voice and data infrastructure. With IP as the underlying network, vendors are able to provide advanced real-time communications capabilities in addition to basic UM functionalities at a reasonable cost, explains the analyst.
Since most end users are focusing on departmental or modular shifts to IP, UM vendors need to develop solutions that start with the basic features that can then be molded to meet the specific needs of enterprises. UM solutions also need to be flexible and extremely scalable. Some vendors are already addressing this need by providing higher port capacity or the capability of clustering servers that can support more users per deployment.
Unified Communications Likely to be the Future of UM Systems
In addition to basic UM features, vendors are including real-time communications capabilities into their solutions portfolio to increase the addressable market and differentiate their offerings. As the UM solutions gain mainstream acceptance, applications are expected to be sold in conjunction with telephony equipment or as part of a broader unified communications portfolio that enterprises are deploying, says the analyst.
Unified communications (UC) is expected to provide a whole range of functionalities including access to the corporate database, presence management, personal assistant, and call filtering. In future, vendors will be seeking to provide UC suites capable of working in tandem with customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning applications. UC applications are also expected to provide pervasive multi-modal communications by integrating with instant messaging, and audio, video, and web conferencing technologies.
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