Internet Messaging

E-Mail Messaging Evolution

E-mail Messaging has evolved over the last 15 years from proprietary systems to standards-based systems and now includes extensions for multimedia support.

E-mail systems started as islands of services providing intra-company e-mail messaging. Different e-mail vendors introduced their own proprietary products and touted their value-added features, hoping to capture the market.

As e-mail matured, it was clear there was a need for message exchange between companies and between different vendors' products. This need created a new market for gateway products that allowed different e-mail products to exchange messages. In addition, Service Providers introduced value-added e-mail services, such as AT&T Mail and GE Information Services, for message exchange between corporations.

Universal E-Mail Messaging

The Internet was the catalyst for creating universal (or worldwide, if you prefer) e-mail messaging. This universal e-mail allows you to e-mail anyone, regardless of whose product you use and the service to which you subscribe. Examples include intra-company and inter-company communications, as well as communications between consumers, and between businesses and consumers. The Internet introduced a set of open standards for messaging that allowed customers to implement different products (from different vendors or freeware) that adhered to the open standard interfaces and ensured they would be able to communicate with others.

Now vendors differentiate their products by how their product is implemented and priced, not by the proprietary nature of the interfaces. For example, some products are free and distributed on the Internet. These generally do not provide extensive support and are geared towards smaller deployments. Other products are focused at carrier class deployments and can scale to millions of users with high availability and manageability. Still others may focus on the user interface design, system performance, or security.

It is becoming clearer to the industry that e-mail standards must be expanded to include support for multimedia messaging. Standards such as MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension) and VPIM Voice Profile for Internet Messaging) are laying the groundwork for message exchange of voice, fax, and video as attachments to standard e-mail.

Voice Messaging

Today's voice messaging market is where the e-mail market was 15 years ago, providing islands of services either intra-company or within a Service Provider's domain. Different voice messaging vendors have their own proprietary products and tout their proprietary value-added features, hoping to capture the market.

uOne is accelerating the evolution of the voice messaging market by leveraging the advances in the Internet messaging market. Clearly there is a need for these two architectures, as well as others such as fax messaging, to converge. This is what Cisco's uOne is all about.

Table of Contents