The End of Tag

It's difficult to imagine the world before voice mail. Will we honestly be able to tell our children some day that there once was a time when the phone rang…and rang…and rang, and just kept on ringing until you hung up? They'll think it sounds as preposterous as our claims that there was a time when all phones had cords.

In recent years, voice mail has matured from a useful invention to a culturally iconic one. How many agreements have been made over voice mail, how many arguments started or ended, how many hearts broken? The solution has become an end in itself:

“Did you talk to him?”

“No, but I left him a voice mail.”

“OK, good.”

Voice mail is notification of what you would be talking to someone about if you were talking to them live. In a way, it gets the monkey off your back and onto someone else's. But, as revolutionary as voice mail has been in changing for the better the way we communicate — in the form of information being exchanged that wouldn't have been if the phone had kept ringing — it also has changed how we communicate in ways that could be construed as negative. If callers use it strategically, voice mail allows them to be passive aggressive, proficient in the art of avoidance.

The negative aspects aren't lost on David Ladd, one of the people who helped make voice mail the huge success that it is. “Sometimes new technologies solve problems but create new problems,” said Ladd alongside voice mail visionary Gordon Matthews at VMX in 1979 when that company marketed the first voice mail solution. “Voice mail solved the problem of not being able to reach people and leave a message for them, but it created a new problem, which is that sometimes you end up talking to the voice mail more than you do the person behind it.”

That evolution — or some might say, de-evolution — in communications is part of what might have convinced Ladd to co-found Orative Communications, a San Jose, Calif.-based company that has developed a new client/server software solution called the Orative Mobile Collaboration Architecture that can be deployed on commercially available handsets. The software allows calls to be screened and filtered based on importance, caller identity or subject matter. It also lets callers display presence and availability, and provides dynamic context.

“This provides an opportunity for the caller to tell you how important the subject matter is, like the purpose of the subject line in e-mails,” said Paul Fulton, CEO of Orative and co-founder with Ladd in the one-year-old company. “Today, people do business by phone, but are largely disconnected. There's a lot of voice mail tag going on.”

Knowing the subject matter is important, because it's part of what helps you eliminate voice mail tag.”

However, voice mail tag isn't just a self-contained problem. It's also symptomatic of a larger problem that corporate enterprises have been dealing with in recent years as more mobile phones have come into the workplace. The PBXes deployed in these environments never have had the functionality and flexibility to make sure calls found mobile users within an enterprise, or to allow those calls to be filtered if the called parties didn't want to answer them right away.

“Enterprise IT guys woke up one day and realized their users were using mobile in the workplace,” Fulton said. Because there is no link between the PBX and mobile phones under the same roof, “It's like putting an old, big black phone back on the desk,” Fulton said.

Even separately, the two solutions don't seem to improve the ability of users to answer all their incoming calls. Despite modern PBX routing and forwarding, and the increasing likelihood that corporate users circulate their mobile phone numbers among their contacts, research has indicated that more than 60% of phone calls still go unanswered, according to Fulton.

“PBXes solved problems and created new ones,” Ladd said. “Mobile phones and their device phonebooks solved problems for users but created new ones in the enterprise. Now, you have a corporate phone and a mobile phone, and multiple mailboxes, and not a whole lot of integration.”

Ladd and Fulton have been thinking about these issues for several years. Before working at VMX, Ladd started his career auspiciously at Bell Labs in 1968, and soon became one of the first two engineers hired by Rolm, a legendary telecom technology developer. He then founded a company called Opcom. Voice mail came into his life later at VMX. VMX was acquired by Octel in the late '80s, and it was during the 1990s that first voice mail, and later the related idea of unified messaging, really took hold. Octel was acquired by Lucent Technologies in 1997, and Ladd worked at Lucent as vice president of the new ventures group there until he joined Mayfield Ventures in 1998.

Ladd met Fulton when Fulton became an executive-in-residence at Mayfield in 2002. Fulton also had roots with legendary telecom firm 3Com. Though Fulton was vice president and general manager at 3Com, he was haunted by what he ultimately saw as the inflexibility of the company's internal PBX system. “I was the general manager at 3Com, and as an end user I was frustrated by our own PBX.

“We found out we had some similar thoughts about the limits of the PBX, and we decided that it was time to try to solve that problem,” Fulton said.

In June 2003, after Ladd and Fulton had used Mayfield's Menlo Park, Calif., office as a home base to incubate a potential solution that the company could take to market, their common thinking resulted in Orative. The company was backed, not surprisingly, by their friends at Mayfield (where Ladd still works), and by Diamondhead Ventures, with a total first-round investment of $6 million.

Orative began trials of its architecture back in February of this year. These evaluations include ongoing proof-of-concept trials with corporate users from Proctor & Gamble and Cisco Systems. Based on the feedback, Fulton said Orative is tweaking user interface aspects of the solution and finishing product development for planned shipping later this year.

Orative isn't quite to the marketing phase yet, but the company plans on marketing its architecture directly to corporate enterprises that are scrambling to cope with all the aforementioned problems created by all of the aforementioned solutions. Ladd doesn't think it will be too difficult to sell. “When we invented voice mail, the reaction was ‘Why would anyone want this?’” Ladd said. “It took a few years, but with this problem, people are very enthusiastic about having a solution.”

Fulton said he believes Orative also can provide carriers with a vehicle into the enterprise. However, both Ladd and Fulton doubt mobile carriers can win bulk orders from corporate enterprises. “Most corporations still use multiple carriers,” Fulton said. “Any software in the enterprise needs to be multi-carrier and multi-handset in nature.”

Ladd wondered why so many start-up companies developing software and solutions for corporate enterprises actually target carriers that haven't proved they can win enterprise business. “Enterprises won't standardize on carriers,” he said. However, he acknowledged that Orative still would work with carriers. “We've designed it so carriers could deploy it, and I guess I could see carriers doing a consumer version of it at some point.”

The direct-to-enterprise approach may differentiate Orative. However, one of the primary challenges to Orative is that it isn't the only vendor chasing enterprise opportunities, and it's not the only company that has realized the limits of voice mail, and how useful presence and availability could be for enterprise users.

Providers of push-to-talk solutions increasingly are evolving to offer presence and availability management, so that users are always aware of the availability of the people on their buddy lists. “Push-to-talk is great, but it starts to fail a bit when people aren't available all the time,” Fulton said. But Fulton insists that P2T does not represent the competition because Orative's architecture is pointed specifically at white-collar knowledge workers, while P2T targets everyone else. The folks at Nextel Communications might beg to differ.

“We're addressing white-collar users who want this tied into their Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange and Domino programs,” Fulton said.

Yet, those white-collar users are exactly the ones that every other company in the industry seems to be chasing. Lucent, the company that acquired Octel — and Ladd — seven years ago, is beginning to boost its investment in its Anypath messaging strategy, the foundation of which is the former Octel products. “We are focusing on how to make mobile messaging easier to use in the enterprise environment,” said J.J. Lhospital, vice president and general manager of messaging solutions at Lucent. Lucent is trying to make messaging more flexible by tightly integrating new multimodal access methods with existing messaging platforms.

HeyAnita is another company mining similar territory. The company, which traditionally has offered voice recognition platforms, recently developed Rapid Message Service, a simplified, one-touch voice messaging service that in its own way improves on traditional voice mail by using the SMS alert mechanism in most phones rather than ringing the phones as regular calls do.

“This is not voice mail,” said Mark Willingham, vice president of marketing at HeyAnita. “This is better than voice mail because it is not as intrusive.”

Solutions from Lucent, HeyAnita and the P2T firms also have the benefit of being available now, while Orative is a few months from commercial availability. However, to Ladd's point, most of these other companies are spending time courting carriers, and while enterprise spending reportedly is on the upswing, there have yet to be any clear winners in the war for enterprise business.

“My goal is for the Orative solution to be something that the companies and people that use it can't do without,” Ladd said, “very much like voice mail.”