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Time for Unified Messaging

Communications and collaboration are critical elements of business success. By Vinita Gupta

As organizations increasingly go global and competition becomes intense, leveraging collective wisdom and effectively applying the same to generate maximum value becomes an imperative. In that sense, the adoption of messaging and collaborative tools will increasingly gain traction as time goes by.

Companies that are able to successfully integrate communication and collaboration processes in their business workflows can lower expenses, increase efficiency, and realize the value of the information assets that they already have.

Unified messaging to drive business

One of the primary challenges for organizations today is enhancing productivity of their mobile business users. This is driving the adoption of unified messaging (UM) to a great extend. Businesses can realize time and cost savings by removing the need to manage multiple messaging applications within one environment and increasing the speed of information sharing.

Chetan Yardi, Country Manager, Lotus, SWG, IBM India says, “The innovation lifecycle within an organization can be significantly reduced by integrating its messaging system with business processes. This can possibly trigger new revenue streams. We will do so by delivering a unified experience that allows businesses to leverage existing investments in telephony and other technology.”

IBM’s unified messaging and collaborative vision aims to help organizations increase responsiveness and business agility through converged communication and collaboration services (real-time, Web, audio and video). Presently the company has Lotus Sametime 7.5.1 software platform for unified messaging and collaboration.

According to Vibhu Ranjan, Lead, Unified Communications (UC), Microsoft Corporation India, unified messaging will make it possible for information workers to be productive from almost anywhere.

Microsoft’s introduction of unified messaging support in Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 can integrate with desktop and mobile clients to give information workers access to voice, fax, and e-mail data from wherever they are. Customers who have adopted the platform under the rapid deployment program include Godrej Industries Ltd and Mindtree Consulting.

Linux based messaging

Enterprises want an extensible real-time platform that can be used to build new applications and integrate with existing applications as well as the telephony infrastructure. That’s why they are looking at Linux-based messaging solutions as these provide a low total cost of ownership in a reliable solution.

If you look at companies that are really grappling today with e-mail and how to move forward, one of the big challenges is that some e-mail systems limit platform, applications and services choices.

For example, if customers are running an Exchange environment, they have to use Active Directory, limiting their choice of other directories, like Novell’s eDirectory or OpenLDAP. Customers are also limited to the anti-spam and anti-virus products supported by that platform.

With Linux, the organizations get the benefit of openness, which means they have a wide variety of options. According to Kalpit Jain, VP -Technology, Netcore, companies are looking at Linux as a messaging platform as it is multitasking (it filters e-mail, anti spam etc), provides scalability (increases the number of users and messages supported), and is cost-effective vis-à-vis proprietary platforms.

He adds, “Other messaging solution requires expertise to manage the products but Linux-based solutions do not. Organizations can focus on other business critical work. Netcore’s solutions can authenticate the Active Directory and if the company already has one it does not have to reinvest. Our Emergic MailServ (formerly, NS MailServ), a Linux based messaging and security suite, has more than a 1,000 installations.”

Jain believes that collaboration and archiving have considerable potential in messaging and if Linux has to compete with proprietary platforms it must adopt these features as well.

IBM’s Lotus Sametime supports Linux, Yardi adds, “Customers have a choice between a one size fits all solution and an open and flexible environment, such as Linux, offering easy customization and major price advantages.”

IM is inevitable

According to analysts, 95 percent of all corporate employees will be using instant messaging as a primary form of communication by 2013.

As more enterprises encourage instant messaging for businesses purposes, instant messaging systems have moved from the fringe to become a key part of an enterprise’s collaboration infrastructure and are increasingly displacing existing forms of communications from ad hoc telephone calls and e-mail to pre-planned meetings and video conferences. Enterprises are beginning to invest in instant messaging and associated technologies accordingly.

We will certainly witness new standards of instant messaging evolving in coming years. To give an example—e-mail has evolved from the desktop to modern collaboration tools. Currently office goers use e-mail, college students use instant messaging and high school students are already using Web 2.0 style instant messaging.

Web-based services

Web-based services, including Web services, mash-ups, blogs and wikis that allow people to collaborate and share information quickly and easily are in vogue. For example, a user can combine or mash-up an instant messaging contact list and location awareness capabilities with online mapping software to get a visual representation of where his contacts are located, local services or local weather updates.

Yardi adds, “We offer customers several capabilities beyond what our competitors currently offer such as location awareness, the Eclipse framework and advanced organizational and social networking tools besides interoperability with leading public instant messaging providers such as AOL, Yahoo and Google.”

Changes in technology affect the way that we collaborate. IBM believes that there will be an emergence of social computing in the context of business. Tools used in popular social collaboration sites such as Orkut, MySpace etc will gain acceptance in the business. Organizations that are quick to understand the power of these tools will be able to effectively leverage social computing for innovation hence IBM has recently launched Lotus Connections.

Over time, we are going to see additional next generation messaging offerings with many new productivity features and again, these will integrate with the other technologies, such as awareness, buddy lists, and all those things that we are using today.