The messages keep pouring in from email, voice mail, fax, SMS and mobile mail. To keep customers in constant contact with family, business partners and friends, service providers are opting for flexible, nontraditional messaging platforms.
With cell phone, SMS messages and email usage all on the increase, however, unified messaging (UM)-which once was envisioned as providing anything and everything on a single platform-has scaled back to include only single or dual service.
A few service providers are choosing UM, but more are showing interest in a variety of mail options and specific features, such as mobile email, urgent email forwarding, real-time response to calls, store-and-forward mechanisms, call forwarding, find me-follow me and call screening.
"Service providers are deploying components of unified messaging and unified communications as enhancements, but they are not calling it unified messaging or unified communications. They are not looking at the premium product," says Krishnamurty Kambhampati, president and CEO of uReach.
The operators' newfound interest in these unbundled UM services has led to much-needed business for the messaging companies, especially from mobile operators. Comverse has signed up Portugal's Vodafone and Malaysia's DiGi Telecommunications. Mirapoint has added DirecTV and China Telecom as customers. U.K.-based ASP Hitoori.com and Israel's Bezeq are now CTI² clients, and Toronto-based ASP Unite Communications is using Primal Technology's messaging platform for its UM offering. Others are also gaining new business in this tight economy. uReach named Cingular and Verizon on its customer list, and Tornado Development has seen recent success in Asia, adding Telekom Malaysia and China Unicom as customers.
Although mobile operators make up the bulk of the messaging providers' growing customer base, they are hesitant to write off wireline providers. For each sector they see unique needs. "Wireline providers are looking for revenue protection, stickiness and decreased churn. They want to keep the revenue streams from eroding, because price points for minutes are decreasing," says Kambhampati. "Wireless providers want to increase traffic."
Setting Price Points
Increasing the time customers spend on their mobile phones is the main objective of providers who are interested in offering messaging services. Checking, responding to and sending more messages translate to more chargeable minutes. Those extra minutes-not the new mail capabilities per se-generate revenue. In many cases service providers are offering these additional communication options for free.
"Billing schemes are directly linked to a service's complexity," says Ofir Zemer, marketing manager of Comverse's messaging division. "For fairly simple services such as messaging, you will never see subscriber fees. These services are designed to add incremental revenue by increasing air time."
Mobile operators will need an integrated billing and messaging platform, though, to move toward a usage-based or pay-to-read/hear model. In an effort to meet the coming demand, MindCTI has partnered with Cisco and Openwave to enable more complex billing. The billing and mediation company's software collects information on inbound and outbound messages from the Cisco fax and voice gateways and Openwave's messaging platform, then categorizes the messages by services.
To measure UM usage, thousands of event records produced from the supporting network elements must be correlated to identify VoIP calls, PSTN calls, fax, email, and all other incoming and outgoing messages. Once the messages are placed in their separate buckets, they are rated depending on business rules for each service. VoIP calls, for example, are rated on duration. Number of pages is the main attribute for faxes, and email is rated by bytes.
"Most billing systems don't have the capabilities to measure usage and identify content in real time," says Galit Lev-Ran, manager of product marketing at MindCTI. "The providers have decided to take the easy way out and promote free services, but UM offers consumers too much power to give it away for free."
Anticipating Billing Requirements
When asked about accounting, the messaging providers quickly point out the massive number of log records created by UM. The platforms capture and correlate events by users and by service, and they generate usage profiles and subscriber profiles for marketing purposes. While the messaging platforms can produce the event data on each message, providers rarely profit from the information.
As is often the case with new services, providers are still unsure how they will bill, whether by prepaid, postpaid, usage or flat-fee options. Most vendors anticipate this and build their offerings accordingly. For now, even though service providers haven't shown a strong interest in recording the events for billing purposes, the messaging companies have begun integration work with billing developers. CTI² and MindCTI have begun integration efforts, and Mirapoint is discussing integration with Portal and Amdocs. None of the partners have joint customers, but they do expect that these messages will be rated and billed for at some point in the future.
"All the capabilities are there," says Jeff Geromel, director of product marketing at Mirapoint. "We produce the necessary information and can parse it into chargeable events. But charges will depend on what the carriers want to rate."
Some providers have made initial billing decisions for messaging services. Verizon introduced Verizon Unified Communications Service (UCS) to New York City in September and expects to expand the offering to the Washington, D.C., area in January. The provider is privately labeling the service from uReach, which will be responsible for the service infrastructure, billing and customer support.
Verizon UCS subscribers will be able to get email, voice mail, faxes, pages, calendar notification and instant messaging via the Web, a wireline phone, a wireless phone or PDA. The Washington service has a range of monthly fees from $9.95 to $25.95 that include 30 to 200 minutes of inbound and outbound calls. Subscribers who use more than the allotted time are charged 9 cents per minute for local service and 10 cents per minute for toll-free calls.
To bill for the service, uReach sends simple CDRs in standard AMA formats or ASCII text directly to eBillit, an Internet payment provider. "The call sessions from the phone are typical, but the events on the Web side are trickier," says Kambhampati. "We can get the style of the session, but not the end of session. Outbound calls are charged, and inbound calls are bundled into the service."
Kambhampati described the integration work with eBillit as fairly painless. "The formats eBillit wanted were pretty easy," he says, "and the level of detail we can capture is extensive."
eBillit will offer customers options to receive their bills on paper or online, and subscribers can pay by check, money order, credit card or automatic deduction from a checking account.
Provisioning: Self-Enrollment or Administrator Assisted?
If messaging is given away or bundled into an already available service, providers could see subscribers signing up in droves-and possibly leaving when a better messaging offer comes along. To stay on top of the incoming and outgoing subscribers, messaging platforms are working on automating the provisioning process and including self-provisioning capabilities where possible.
Provisioning messaging and UM accounts depends on the network architecture, says MindCTI's Lev-Ran. If the billing system stores the accounting information in its database, adding new accounts is fairly easy. Provisioning is more complicated, though, when account information is also stored on the messaging platform.
To simplify provisioning in a distributed environment, MindCTI has expanded its provisioning server's role. Through XML or another messaging format, the provisioning server will pass on all account changes and updates through the service chain. Changing a password, updating a name or adding or deleting accounts can all be done through the provisioning server, which automatically relays the information to the network elements.
To enable this functionality, MindCTI's provisioning server must be integrated with the messaging platform. The billing company has integrated with Openwave and UniExchange, and it is doing development work with CTI². According to Boaz Gruener, vice president of marketing at CTI², his company has integrated its UM platform with other provisioning systems from Amdocs, Portal, IBM and Tivoli.
Using a more centralized approach to provisioning, Mirapoint uses an LDAP directory. Many of Mirapoint's customers have an Oracle database for billing and provisioning, then they populate the LDAP server for messaging from the customer database, says Geromel. "This centralized approach allows for single sign-on for customers through a password for all messaging services, and it feeds into all the back-end systems," he says.
Releasing old accounts must also be considered. Lev-Ran cautions against deleting the accounts of past subscribers too quickly. The resources supporting them must be released for current paying accounts, but contact information such as numbers and mail addresses need at least a two-month cooling-off period to prevent the old subscriber's mail from being forwarded to a new subscriber's mailbox.
This constant adding and deleting of mail accounts is a never-ending, thankless task. To make the job more manageable for administrators, some messaging developers have included self-enrollment or self-care features. uReach, for example, has registration forms built in, so subscribers can sign up for service or unsubscribe. Comverse is also contemplating self-care features. After a successful self-enrollment project developed with a Swiss operator, Comverse will be adding a generic version of the self-care features to its platform in the coming months.
These self-care capabilities are attractive to subscribers, but they are not fully automatic. Some form of intervention is required, usually from the mail administrator, when accounts are closed or added. Although having a CSR handle these tasks may sound appealing, these responsibilities most often fall to the administrator because of the sensitive nature of the account information.
Network and Customer Safety
Service providers must secure their messaging environment on multiple fronts. Customers, hackers and incoming viruses are threats that can cause major disturbances on a network. The providers must keep hackers out of the system, confine subscribers to their private message box and detect viruses before they enter the system.
"Security is a big deal these days. It's very much on the service providers' minds," says Mirapoint's Geromel. "To deliver an integrated product, we removed the vulnerability of open systems by making ports available for only specific applications. We also hardened the operating systems to prevent Unix shell access."
The messaging companies attempt to protect the system on three levels: customer entry, application and network. To cordon off each subscriber message box on the Web, service providers are using 128-bit SSL encryption, double authentication engines and silent login. RADIUS servers authenticate subscribers through their user names and passwords.
"Service providers have to be sure that only the identified subscriber can access the calls and that there is no cross-access from one organization to another," says CTI²'s Gruener.
To protect the system from intrusion, demilitarized zones and firewalls border the messaging environment. On the application level, the messaging platforms have partnered with antivirus companies and other security providers for additional safety measures, such as spam and domain blocking, virus detection and protection against denial-of-service attacks.
Even with these security measures, Comverse's Zemer asserts that providers may have a difficult time selling their messaging services into the corporate environment. "Security is not a technology, it's a state of mind," Zemer says. "Only a few operators are seen as trusted. These few may win enterprise clients, but most corporate customers are wary of operators having access to their enterprise data."
More Messages on More Devices: Keeping Up With Advancements
During the last few years, messaging devices have become fashion accessories that demand regular makeovers to stay in style. Keeping up with the new technological trend requires constant diligence from the messaging providers.
The messaging companies claim they can adapt to any device or technology that comes along. "These architectures are built with the anticipation of new devices and new networks," says uReach's Kambhampati. But the companies depend on designers using open standards and established protocols.
"Most devices talk IMAP4, SMTP, POP3 and other known standards," says Zemer. "When a device uses open standards and our platform speaks its language, we can manage the integration fairly easy."
The platforms rely on common Internet protocols and have, or are adding, WAP and iMode support. For SMS messages and notifications, they are integrating through SMTP and relying on SNMP for management. Java, XML, SOAP and other programming techniques also help connect the interfaces.
All of these help messaging providers respond rapidly to client and transport developments, yet the providers often find themselves in a holding pattern waiting for the next "big thing." Reacting too quickly during the launch of a new messaging handheld could result in lost development resources that can't be recouped if the device doesn't have staying power. Instead, developers take a wait-and-see approach until a significant portion of the public has adopted the latest technology.
A few messaging providers are trying to anticipate the market's next venue. uReach and CTI² have already developed UM platforms for television, prior to any groundswell of support. Kambhampati readily admits interactive TV is a nascent market, but he is following the theory that "technology should cater to people's laziness." In his vision, when TV viewers hear the phone ring a box will pop up on the TV screen that identifies the caller. The call can be ignored, answered or sent to voice mail.
CTI² and partner 4UTV, a subsidiary of Connect TV, have also adopted interactive TV. With the partners' iTV client, digital TV viewers can receive and send email messages, view fax messages and listen to voice messages through their television set. A blinking notification on the corner of the television screen alerts viewers that voice mail messages, email or SMS messages have arrived.
Why Isn't UM a Billable Service?
UM still teeters between a free and chargeable service. If UM gives so much "power" to subscribers, why not make them pay for it? Providers claim that since customers don't see UM as a necessity, it doesn't merit fees.
Is customers' refusal to pay for UM at the root of why the service is free, or is UM too expensive to deploy and too difficult to charge for? MindCTI's Lev-Ran argues that UM billing is too complex at this early stage and that most providers don't have the necessary systems in place.
"All the different types of messages must be identified and separated, and the usage information for each of these messages must be collected and rated. VoIP calls must be separated and rated differently from PSTN calls, faxes, emails and pages. All these unique services make the billing extremely difficult."
Add in the high costs of deploying this type of sophisticated billing and rating environment, for a service that may or may not be widely accepted by the consumers, and you've got enough financial risk to cool potential support. "The service providers have not seen enough demand to design a pure event-driven model," says Geromel. "The market is not large enough for providers to get excited about charging 5 cents for every message. And those billing systems require intensive custom development work."
To move from free to fee, providers will have to invest in new messaging platforms, inform and train consumers about the service and consider a range of pricing strategies. Already, the market is seeing leading providers address these challenges.
Verizon, Cingular and AT&T Wireless' support of UM demonstrate an uptake in consumer adoption that is also defended by analyst research. Current Ovum forecasts reveal that the UM market reached 5.5 million active users for 2001 and will reach 218 million users by 2007. The firm also projects that revenues will reach $31 billion by 2007. After a decade of sporadic victories (see "Unified Messaging's Setback Saga,"), and whether billed as a free or for fee service, messaging and UM may finally be primed for success. |
