For most traveling professionals, staying in touch is a chore that requires them to carry a smattering of communications gadgets ranging from cell-phones and pagers to personal organizers and personal computers. But increasingly, companies are striving to simplify the task of connection.
Last week, Sun Microsystems Inc. and Lucent Technologies Inc. said they would join forces to develop so-called unified messaging systems that would let users send and receive electronic mail, faxes and phone messages via personal computer or a telephone.
The technology, which the companies hope to deliver early in 1999, will be marketed to telephone companies and Internet service providers, who will in turn use it to create services for their own customers.
“We have a number of major telephone (companies) who have asked for this but they didn’t have the scalability,” said Marty Parker, vice president of strategy and business development for Lucent’s Octel Messaging Division.
Under the deal, terms of which were not disclosed, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Sun will provide its electronic mail technology as well as its powerful server computers and software technology to run the systems that store and manage the unified mailboxes. Lucent, which acquired Milpitas, Calif.-based Octel Communications last year, will provide voice-mail technology and software that can translate text into voice, which was developed at its Bell Labs unit.
Phone users, whether they are using their own phones or a pay phone, would be able to dial up a mailbox to retrieve voice messages, e-mails and faxes. They could also respond to electronic mail by recording a voice message that would be played on a recipient’s PC via audio. Likewise, a PC user could open up a mailbox to read not just electronic mail, but voice messages and faxes.
But while the idea of a central mailbox that can handle a variety of message formats is appealing, analysts warned that, so far, the response to the fledgling market for unified messaging has been lukewarm at best.
