Technology & Business Drivers for Unified Messaging

Carrots and Sticks

When Information Technology organizations begin to evaluate the best way to unify their voice mail and email messaging systems, they do so for a variety of reasons. Some of the forces driving IT departments to deploy Unified Messaging come from their internal customers. The user base of mobile professionals needs new communications and messaging capabilities to do its job effectively and to gain a competitive advantage. And other forces are a result of changing technology as new and better technologies become available and cause older technologies to reach the end of their product life.

Voice messaging end-of-support

Legacy voice mail systems have been in place for several years at many companies. Although they have been a stable workhorse at these organizations, they are reaching end-of-support in 2008 and 2011, depending on the make and model. This follows the end-of-sale that was reached for these systems in 2005. Consequently, CIOs, Network Architects, and their IT departments are putting voice messaging replacement projects in their budgets.

Consolidation of data and voice networks in the enterprise

Organizations are consolidating wherever possible on their networks to lower management costs and to simplify their architecture. Since legacy voicemail systems do not allow this kind of consolidation, IT departments are looking to replace them.

Migration to IP telephony

Most companies are migrating to IP telephony slowly. As their old TDM PBX equipment is written off and phased out, it gets replaced with a version that supports IP telephony. Organizations are also installing IP telephony when new offices are opened or when a facility gets moved to a new location.

The introduction of IP telephony at a site typically causes the IT department to re-evaluate their voicemail system strategy and introduce Unified Messaging in the process.

Support for mobile workers

Many companies have an increasing number of mobile workers who need better and better tools in order to be efficient on the road. Unified Messaging systems really shine when it comes to enabling your mobile users to become more responsive, efficient, and accessible.

The need for mobility features is especially strong in service organizations like professional services, legal, engineering consulting, and management consulting. In addition, organizations that have campus-wide mobility in fields like IT professionals and healthcare benefit from Unified Messaging.