Unified communications is also based on an IP architecture that offers converged services, such as voice, video and data.
Growth is driven by wireless and bundled service offerings, they say.
With unified communications, service providers can collect messages and then notify and deliver messages to customers, irrespective of their location, time or access device. Service providers benefit with rapid time to market, reduced risk, increased revenue, increased market penetration and improved customer loyalty, the companies say. Unified communications can help service providers tap into the 125 million hosted voice mailboxes worldwide and deliver the up to 25 million unified messaging boxes projected to be in service by 2003, the companies say. They add that unified communications will also enable service providers to carry the 250 billion pages projected to be faxed over IP in 2004. A few service providers today announced that they are now offering unified communications services based on the companies' new system.