Traditional VoiceMail solutions typically served two main objectives: from the customer’s perspective, they were meant to improve reachability by compensating for lack of geographic coverage and times of unavailability, e.g. due to the phone being switched off or whilst in a parallel call. In addition, from the network operators’ perspective, those VoiceMail systems provided a noticeable revenue from call completion covering in-net scenarios as well as interconnection and roaming.
At the same time, the underlying VoiceMail solutions were designed quite often as monolithic systems with little to no flexibility regarding the user experience or the integration with other systems.
While such design might have been fit for requirements stemming from the 1990’s prime time for traditional Voice-Mail solutions, more often than not it still dictates (and thus limits) today’s implementations.
Moreover, this traditional approach included the caveat of these monolithic solution requiring dedicated internal databases, storage solution, or media resources. Lastly such solutions would – more often than not – be limited to proprietary hardware or at least dedicated infrastructure components.
At CreaLog we believe it is due time for a paradigm shift and to re-think any such „last century” design for VoiceMail. This document outlines our vision for a true „next generation VoiceMail” approach – where „next generations” will not simply mean to switch from SS7/E1 to SIP/RTP interfaces, i.e. from TDM to IMS.
