MESSAGING SOLUTIONS

Messaging is a fundamental requirement in modern-day communications. Traditional voicemail services are now everywhere, and are rapidly evolving into unified messaging service offerings that integrate voice, e-mail, and fax messaging into a single multimedia messaging capability. Ovum has forecasted about 25 million unified messaging mailboxes worldwide in 2003, growing to 170 million unified messaging mailboxes plus $13 billion in subscription revenues worldwide by 2006. The opportunity for service providers in this growing market is enormous.

Historically, voicemail services have been implemented on TDM-based “service nodes,” which typically integrate application logic, mail storage, and IVR/VRU capabilities into a monolithic, expensive, and proprietary solution with limited flexibility. Early unified messaging solutions required a complex integration of IP packet networks for e-mail messaging, with TDM circuit-based networks for voicemail and fax. A next-generation solution can manage and integrate all these media types across a single network infrastructure, driving costs and complexity out of ongoing operations, and allowing progressive service providers to achieve competitive advantage.

Convedia Media Servers deployed in a next-generation wireless and wireline architecture provide the media processing muscle necessary for a cost-effective unified messaging solution. By integrating voice messages with e-mail and fax into a single, uniform, IP-based packet infrastructure, a next-generation solution drastically reduces the cost and complexity of a circuit-based networking technology. And with the unification of multiple message formats, new features and capabilities become possible—such as a single mailbox for both wireline and wireless access, browser-based interfaces to manage all message types (including voice), presence-enabled instant messaging, integrated video messaging, and speech portals that can read e-mails over a phone.

Convedia media servers offer many industry-leading capabilities and benefits to support carrier-scale VoIP messaging solutions including:

• Media processing of up to 18,000 ports on a single shelf
• Menu prompt playback
• DTMF generation and detection (for IVR/VRU functionality)
• Internal message recording and playback
  (for short or temporary messages)
• External message recording and playback
  (via NFS/HTTP for long messages)
• Skip forwared while playing a message.
• Fax detection and notification
  (notifies application when fax detected in RTP stream)
• Video media processing (for videomail applications)
• Text To Speech (TTS) capabilities for "reading" text over the phone
• Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) capabilities for speech-enabled control, capturing and storing voice messages in text format

Convedia, along with our messaging partners, can offer unique, differentiated next generation messaging solutions. New features and capabilities allow differentiated service offerings which can drive high margin revenues, while the efficiencies of managing all message media types over a common IP infrastructure drives costs and complexity out of ongoing operations.