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Unified Messaging Rides UC Wave

Posted by Blair Pleasant, on January 18, 2007

Announcing New Study on Unified Messaging:

Unified Messaging (UM) solutions will experience increased growth as they ride the wave of the rapidly expanding Unified Communications (UC) market. Though previously enduring lackluster growth as a stand-alone application, the UM market will exhibit rapid momentum as enterprises begin deploying UC solutions over the next few years.

COMMfusion LLC has just released its latest market study, Enterprise Unified Messaging Market 2005-2010, one of the most comprehensive studies on unified messaging - the drivers, challenges, key players, technology, trends, and market forecasts.

UM Rides the Wave of Unified Communications (pdf)

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Comment posted by brendan adams, on October 15, 2008

Great article once again. One question - what are the 35 core features - it'd be interesting to know.

Comment posted by Blaine Munro, on October 16, 2008

Blair, Even though Microsoft is positioning themselves to move OCS into telephony space, many companies are now just adopting IPT. The life cycles for many tradional PBX are very long and many companies are holding back on moving off these TDM systems due to investment. As companies sunset their old TDM systems and move to IPT, there is a huge skill set shift required, generally voice guy will require a network background since voice become just another application on the network. Microsoft on the other hand would like most large enterprises to jump over the IPT step and move voice into AD/Exchange arena. This is a paradigm shift most enterprises are not prepared to make. The exchange admin would in affect manage dial plans and call routing. Unified Comm is really Microsoft's only growth area and OCS is truly a SMB solution and Microsoft is trying very hard to make it a enterprise voice solution. It will be interesting how Microsoft and Cisco play this market out. I've been in the process of looking at all aspects of UC with telephony vendors and since OCS is relatively new (Oct 2007), the interoperability is very unclear especially when Microsoft's mediation servers may need to be used as a tactical short term approach to gain in roads into most enterprise telephony environments. Thanks again for you article. Regards, Blaine Munro

Comment posted by Marty, on October 16, 2008

Thanks for the comments, Blaine.

My experience with clients is a bit different, as I do see large enterprises deploying OCS for thousands or tens of thousands of users and usually with a separate manager, not the Exchange manager, since this is a separate set of servers and server roles. Of course, OCS 2007 and R2 can even be installed without Exchange.

The interesting things I see include:

-- The OCS 2007 (and Live Communications Server before it) often begins with IM and Presence and the users often progress to web conferencing (application sharing) and only later realize they can "click to call". I.e. UC comes in as a new way of doing business; IM begins to replace phone calls altogether and then the internal phone calls related to those IM activities begin to flow through OCS. So, it looks less like a telephony replacement than, say a cell phone call.

-- The Applications and Server teams who usually run OCS do not see it as an extension or replacement of telephony, rather as software control of media streams. They think, rightly or wrongly, in terms of web content -- iTunes, YouTube, corporate webcasts and training videos, etc.

Pretty typical of "disruptive" technologies. They don't start by replacing traditional solutions, just as the phone originally was used to displace local messenger services, not to replace long-distance telegraph messages. Thanks again, for your comments and ideas. Great dialog! Marty Parker