IBM takes Neighborhood voice mail upscale

IBM is helping MCI bring business-grade voice mail and messaging services to consumer through The Neighborhood’s Personal Voicemail and Messaging Center, the companies announced this week. IBM’s Websphere Internet infrastructure software will drive the service from both its voice response and unified messaging platforms.

“A lot of services relative to unified messaging have been delivered to corporate customers, but for consumers this is somewhat novel,” said Joe Ziskin, vice president for the telecom industry at IBM.

The service will include message notification and retrieval by either phone or the Internet and new message alerts by e-mail, pager or phone. It will run on IBM’s eServer pSeries and AIX servers using IBM’s Unix operating system with IBM’s Power4 microprocessors.

The Websphere software product suite leverages IBM’s service provider delivery environment (SPDE) architecture, framework and design principals in order to scale to potentially 2.5 million mailboxes.

Ziskin said the implementation with MCI, which replaced its legacy voice mail system, demonstrates IBM’s commitment to open standards and the scalability of its platform. It is the largest implementation of IBM’s message center worldwide.

“It brings all the capabilities for notification and retrieval together in a single platform that allows [MCI] to drive this to a consumer play on a cost effective basis,” Ziskin said.

IBM’s Voice Response system, which is responsible for answering and routing calls, also allows for the creation of new applications through either its native development environment or by using Java and VoiceXML development tools.

This announcement comes the same week AOL made its debut in the voice mail business. (http://telephonyonline.com/ar/telecom_telcos_youve_competition/index.htm.)