IP Voicemail and the Revolution in Internet-Based Communications

IP VOICEMAIL
and the Revolution in
Internet-Based Communications
(Originally published in Messaging Magazine, March/April 1999)

Alerted via pager while in-flight from Los Angeles to London, Sales VP Ernest Worthing calls his voice mailbox from his cell phone to retrieve the good news and the bad—his company, Trilateral Industries, is one of the finalists selected to bid on the multi-million dollar thermo-controlled Maguffin unit for the Space Station program. Unfortunately, listening to the proposal preparation instructions from the NASA contracts director, Ernest learns that, along with its proposal, Trilateral will also have to submit a working prototype—all due in one week. Though he still has another five hours of flight time ahead of him, Ernest adds some comments and directions via voice annotation and forwards the NASA message to his Singapore-based Manufacturing VP, Cecily Wong, flagged with an Urgent indicator to get past her pager filter. Waking up at dawn an hour later, Cecily retrieves the message, stores it for later retrieval and detailed analysis on her personal computer, and forwards it to her early shift foreman. Before she reaches the office, the production line has already begun planning the preliminary die casts.

Streamlined business communications like these are an imminent reality, thanks to the rapid convergence underway between traditional telecommunications networks and emerging Internet-based services. The transition from proprietary local voice networks to the universal connectivity of the Internet is creating new opportunities for service providers and their customers. Businesses and consumers will be able to extend the reach of their communications beyond their local networks with greater ease and flexibility, as next-generation service providers parlay data communications technologies into more competitive service offerings and higher profitability.

Internet Protocol (IP)-based voicemail—traditional voice messaging implemented through the open standards of the Internet—is among the first services to spring from this revolutionary convergence. The same infrastructure that enabled the World Wide Web can also serve as the backbone for IP voicemail and other advanced services. Just as computer networks standardized on a common communications infrastructure with the initial wave of the Internet explosion, so too will telephony networks abandon proprietary voice messaging systems in favor of the universal accessibility and interconnectivity of the global network.

In the coming year, IP voicemail service offerings will proliferate among both traditional hosted voicemail providers—the telcos and voice-network companies—and the emerging class of Internet-based service providers. For both types of service providers, the adoption of IP voicemail systems will be an inevitable transition based on economies of scale, operational costs, and the need to offer advanced voice and data services to remain competitive in a crowded market. IP voicemail offers immediate advantages over traditional voice network systems, for service providers and end users alike.

To fully understand the significance of the advantages offered IP voicemail, it is necessary to identify its respective benefits for service providers and end users, and the basic underlying technology and infrastructure requirements.

Benefits for Service Providers
Voicemail over the IP network offers simplified, broad-reaching communications, using modular components and a standards-based infrastructure. Building on established markets for telephone, cellular, and messaging services, IP voicemail extends the convenience and functionality of these services, especially for business customers who benefit most from more flexible access. IP voicemail may be offered singly or in conjunction with other IP services such as fax, e-mail, paging and real-time voice.

The linchpin to galvanizing IP voicemail and other advanced messaging services lies not in enterprise-level deployments, but in large-scale messaging services offered by ISPs, telcos, cable companies, Web portals, and cellular providers. Service providers are ideally positioned to offer IP messaging capabilities at attractive costs because of inherent economies of scale—they already possess large-scale network infrastructures, large customer bases and the expertise in marketing services to them. In addition, service providers can leverage their existing network infrastructure, to easily expand their current service offerings into differentiated feature sets targeted at vertical and horizontal market segments.

For businesses, hosted services such as IP voicemail represent a cost-effective alternative to trying to upgrade or deploy equivalent on-premise solutions, freeing them to focus resources on their core businesses. For service providers trying to attract and retain customers, IP voicemail services are a powerful means to establish brand loyalty—but only if services meet subscribers demanding expectations for advanced feature options as well as absolute reliability and security. If service providers can meet their customers’ voicemail needs, the way is paved for businesses to feel comfortable allowing more, if not all, of their messaging services to be hosted. With so much at stake, a service provider’s voicemail infrastructure must accommodate the growth of all its hosted companies, and it should scale, as necessary, to meet increases in message traffic, user populations, and changes in the frequency and type of access.

Furthermore, a service provider’s IP voicemail infrastructure must be geared to the more demanding requirements of business messaging environments, which average over 20 times the daily message volume of the consumer and home user market. An IP voicemail offering must be backed by service level guarantees for predictable performance even during periods of peak activity (i.e., message delivery within a specified timeframe) as well as 24x7 operation reliability and no lost messages—ever.

These considerations require service providers to select their messaging infrastructure with care. Systems adapted from e-mail servers designed for enterprise-level intranets are inadequate to the service provider environment—only carrier-scale messaging servers designed for multimedia applications and capable of supporting millions of user accounts will suffice. Once deployed, this type of carrier-scale infrastructure offers significant advantages over proprietary, voice network-based solutions: modularity, cost effectiveness, open standards, and universal access.

Modular Architecture. Modularity in an IP voicemail infrastructure is key to avoiding the past pitfalls of all-or-nothing proprietary technologies. Flexibility in selecting compatible best of breed solutions from multiple vendors with specialized expertise enables a service provider to develop a superior service, which over time can be expanded to support growing demand or extended with additional services, in turn benefiting end users with more service options. It also allows the service provider to swap and allocate components as economics and usage dictate, allowing more competitive offers and lower costs to the end user.

In many cases IP voicemail solutions will be built upon or integrated with existing services and IP backbone networks. It is important when building upon existing infrastructure to ensure that new investments enable the provider to grow and expand services as market demands dictate. Only a standards-based, modular solution supported by a carrier-scale messaging infrastructure, multimedia message store, and centralized directory will achieve this goal. The components that work together to create a unified messaging system are illustrated in Figure 1.

Multimedia Message Store. The message store is the central repository for all messaging traffic. As such, it needs to accommodate the very different storage needs of voice messaging, including the greater variety in message size and file formats (e-mail, voice, fax) as well as increased volumes of message access, to remain highly responsive under heavy load. A carrier-scale message store employs hierarchical storage, online backup and recovery, shared folders, shared messages, and transaction journaling to ensure messages are never lost.

Carrier-Scale LDAP Directory. The directory of all service provider user accounts supports all routing and delivery functions, as well as centralized subscriber provisioning and billing. A carrier-scale directory should utilize directory caching for high performance and distributed operation. In addition, it should support advanced services such as delegated administration for hosted messaging services, and class-of-service offerings.

Client Access Servers. Access servers allow sending and receipt of messages from the common message store and directory via standards-based deposit and retrieval (Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), Point-of-Presence (POP), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)) through the user’s preferred medium (cell or wired telephone, computer, Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), or fax). A flexible platform extends advanced offerings such as message waiting notification services, short messaging, and "follow me" services. To support a carrier-scale infrastructure, access servers should be both stateless and independently scalable from the message store.

Message Transfer Agent (MTA). Service providers require independently-scalable and stateless MTAs for high performance and cost-effective routing of millions of messages per day. Powerful and flexible rules logic should govern personal preferences, filtering, domain routing, and spam controls. Business messaging features such as Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Delivery Status Notification (DSN) must also be supported.

Remote Access Servers. Messages of all types (e-mail, fax and voice) can be sent and received through remote access servers. The remote access server contacts the MTA which deposits and retrieves the message in the message store via the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). Today, separate data and voice-based remote access servers allow message access through the medium of choice—PC users call in through the remote data access server to retrieve all types of messages, using the Post Office Protocol 3 (POP3) or IMAP4 servers to access the message store, while phone access to messages is currently enabled by voice-based access servers. This server flexibility enhances traditional level of service with full Internet scale connectivity, and the broader capability to share messages with any other user with Internet connectivity.

Operations, Administration, Management and Provisioning (OAM&P). Standards-based management modules must insure high reliability and availability, online backup and recovery, and functions for seamless operation in a carrier-scale environment.

Lower Hardware and Maintenance Costs. IP voicemail offers inherent cost benefits over proprietary systems restricted to the in-service network. These cost savings result from several factors. A standard components-based architecture is inherently less expensive, due to use of off-the-shelf hardware such as disk drives, and the competitive "buyer’s" marketplace that results from use of open standards. The architecture may be built up over time so that the cost savings continue over the complete life cycle, a significant issue for start-up services, and one that insures consistent long-term savings. Furthermore, additional services such as e-mail, fax and short messaging can be built on the same infrastructure, amortizing the costs over a wider range of revenue sources.

Open Standards. The open standards and protocols of the Internet offer obvious advantages over the limitations of proprietary intra-network solutions. Adopters are not locked into single-vendor sources, new capabilities can be added, different systems are interoperable with one another, costs are typically lower, and systems investments are protected. A voicemail service based on the open standards of the IP network also transforms the entire population of Internet e-mail users—estimated at 75 million strong¹—into an in-place customer base for expanded messaging services to the billions of telephone customers.

The standards necessary to support IP voicemail are either in-place or in the process of being finalized: Voice Profile for Internet Mail (VPIM) for formatting voice messages as Internet mail, Fax Profile for Internet Mail (FPIM), is a standard for formatting fax messages as Internet mail; SMTP for sending and receiving Internet mail; Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) for multimedia e-mail attachments; client access protocols (POP3, IMAP 4, HTTP) for Internet connectivity through various mail clients and Web browsers; and LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) for Internet-wide access and exchange of directory information.

Universal Access. IP voicemail can easily be extended to allow senders and receivers to communicate through their medium of choice—wireline or cellular telephones or personal computers. On the surface, this change might appear to be merely a boost in convenience for end users. Upon deeper examination, however, the benefits are more profound—geographic boundaries disappear and vast new worldwide markets open up. Users are no longer locked into a single network or narrow, isolated channels of communication. Today’s proprietary solutions make it impossible for one person using an internal network to forward a voicemail to someone on another network, much less across the world. With IP voicemail, the message can travel anywhere over the global IP network. Furthermore, messages can be independently sent and retrieved through either phone or data media. Eventually, an individual’s voice, fax and e-mail messages will be centralized into a service provider’s single universal store accessible by a variety of devices, an elegant alternative to the limitations posed by point-to-point communications restricted to a single medium. All messages in this store may be answered, saved, or forwarded to other users in the network who are free to use their own preferred access methods to retrieve messages.

Benefits for Business Customers
For businesses, hosted IP voicemail offers significant benefits and advantages over existing in-house alternatives. Even for larger companies, attempts to achieve this functionality through in-house systems are inherently costlier, since they entail dedicated resources, maintenance, and support for a significantly smaller user base, such as sales managers and executives. In contrast, larger service provider subscriber populations result in lower per-user costs, enabling businesses to offer IP voicemail to more employees in a hosted messaging environment. Furthermore, the open standards of IP-based voicemail extend its reach beyond the hosting service provider to include the entire Internet, unlike proprietary systems that limit voice messaging to the internal network. As hosted messaging services continue to evolve, businesses will be able to choose from an increasingly greater variety of service packages—including fax, e-mail, paging and real-time voice—made possible by the interconnectivity of the IP network. The ultimate service will be the unified in-box, a central storage and access point for all IP voice messaging, fax, and e-mail.

The shift to the IP network furthered by services like IP voicemail benefits businesses through greater simplicity and convenience, instantly scalable infrastructure, complete security and reliability, administrative control over company mailboxes, and global interconnectivity.

Simplicity and Convenience. The transition to hosted IP voicemail is a transparent one for customers already familiar with voicemail services. Additional messaging features can be added as logical extensions to known services, without the need to master new technology. If anything, communications are simplified through the unified in-box, which encompasses all communication options without requiring a fax machine or an extra phone line.

Messages stored and transmitted over IP networks will be accessible through the medium of choice—telephone, e-mail or Web client, fax, or PDA. Users have access to their messages anytime, anywhere. Communication can still take place even if both use different access means. Furthermore, since communication is no longer limited to real-time access, the unified inbox ensures that a call or fax is never missed due to busy lines.

Yet another benefit is better management of communications—businesses can track all communications and leverage e-mail storage and forwarding to share faxes and phone messages online, streamlining communications and reducing paper waste.

Right-Sized Infrastructure. A hosted IP messaging infrastructure insures customers always have a right-sized infrastructure. Businesses only pay for what they use, and can immediately scale up or down as needs dictate. In the current climate of frequent corporate mergers, companies can immediately adjust their infrastructure to support organizational changes.

Security and Reliability. True carrier-scale messaging infrastructure allows service providers to guarantee the highest confidentiality and security in its customers’ communications—security features are equivalent to and in many cases surpass those of in-house systems. Businesses availing themselves of hosted services also benefit from the greater reliability, 24x7 availability, and "no lost messages" guarantees inherent in a service provider’s carrier-scale architecture. Through service level agreements, businesses can select the priority messaging levels that meet their requirements.

Control. Through delegated self-administration, businesses retain full administrative control over their hosted messaging accounts, with appropriate configuration and management features at each organizational level, from corporate IT managers to end users.

Global Reach. The IP-based infrastructure extends business messaging beyond the confines of its own intranet (or fragmented departmental intranets) into unified, worldwide communications accessible to external partners and customers. It also extends voicemail and other messaging services to underserved populations with minimal telecommunications infrastructure.

In conclusion, the convergence of traditional telecommunications networks and emerging Internet services makes IP voicemail hosted by service providers cost-effective, flexible and reliable. Hosted IP voicemail and other messaging services extends user’s reach beyond the limitations of the traditional in-house network and points the way to the ultimate interconnectivity made possible by the unified in-box and the fully hosted intranet. MM