August 29, 2006, 1:27 PM — Listen to the column "Communications Mashup", or visit our Podcast Center to hear more by James Gaskin.
Call it Unified Messaging, Unified Collaboration, or call it years of hype with unfulfilled potential. Or you can call it Unifying Communications like the people at AVST (.com), as long as you keep trying to organize and update communications in new ways. And have another year or two of patience.
Hardy Myers, President and CEO of AVST Corp., the makers of CallXPress, believes the heightened interest over the last 12 months in whatever communications mashup term you prefer means the wait may soon be over. Myers is most excited about going beyond the "one inbox for everything" model to a world where communication applications work easily with business processes for some exciting new services.
A call to most companies today has taken a step backward from 20 years ago when a receptionist answered the phone. Myers calls it a "dumb transaction" because the system can take a message and maybe forward the call to the person's cell phone, but that's about it. Remember when a person answered and told you where people were, took a message, or connected you to someone else who could help? It seems a shame the search today is for an expensive, integrated system that can replace a minimum wage receptionist, but that would be wonderful.
In essence, Myers and AVST provide the middleware between different PBX systems, voice mail, and IP telephony. No one company has a homogeneous voice network today, and it won't get easier anytime soon. Throw in the need for Instant Messaging and collaborative application interfaces, and the mashup can look pretty ugly.
Of course, the oldest and least intelligent part of any voice network is the user base (my words, not Myers). But when new voice messaging systems must provide antiquated voice mail menu trees to match what employees know, something's wrong. We can't blame AVST, because they work for the customers, but we can blame a lack of intelligent design for new voice mail systems and poor user training in many companies.
Can Unified Messaging fix employees? No, but advanced UM with data services integration can start to link voice messaging with back end systems such as CRM and ERP. Wouldn't it be nice if a sales person received an IM on his or her PDA about a customer's order, clicked a link, and sent the order to accounting? Maybe next year, especially if companies like AVST keep integrating systems.
