Unified Messaging Systems

Unified Messaging Systems have plenty of benefits to offer to businesses and individuals alike as this technology has been evolving for years now. Unified messaging systems simplify communications to a great extend as they are more efficient and integrate several different forms of messaging into a single box. Furthermore, subscribers of UMS can regulate how they want to the reached without making the senders wonder what's the best way to get in touch with them.

The unified messaging market is full of competitors with nortel unified messaging and inter tel unified messaging being amongst the leading companies.

In the past, the only problems that stood in front the growth of unified messaging systems were the email storage, complete integration and voice mails handling. The storage problem was related to the fact that in the 90s, email providers were only giving about 5MB storage space which was completely insufficient for the needs of a unified messaging system. But as you know now, this is no longer a problem as the email storage has been growing with the rate of more than 40% per year on average and GMail for example is giving its users 2GB of free email space. The thing is that with all that unification of voice and fax into a user's mailbox, the space requirements will only get bigger since we are talking about a larger files (faxes are represented as images, while voice mails are attached to the email as a sound file, '.wav') that users typically want saved for future reference or to forward them to someone else. This required a significant investment in storage systems on behalf of the unified messaging providers. Initially, there wasn't a technology to convert sound files into text for archiving or messaging (sms to a mobile phone). Now, with the advent of voice-to-text software, this has become possible, although still not perfect. Unified messaging systems consider voice as just another data type.

The factors that contribute to the growth of unified messaging systems are the increased workforce mobility, increased usage of the Internet, the popularity of phone systems and mobile devices such as PDAs and smart phones, hosted pbx, and last but not least, the growing enthusiasm that workers have for flexible working environments, called "virtual offices." On top of that, the Internet speed is increasing (both upload and download) while the bandwith is getting cheaper.

In today's business and extremely heavy competition in all industries, replying to customers' questions can make the difference. Buyers want fast responses and this is becoming essential. In this context, unified messaging systems help enterprises increase their productivity by giving them access to the company's information immediately.

Inter tel unified messaging provides a single contact point for all your important messages.