Unity supports e-mail clients for Outlook and Notes; it leverages these familiar interfaces with an embedded VCR-style interface for voicemail and traditional e-mail. Unlike Communité, Unity has a speedup/slowdown feature in its RealSpeak TTS engine that lets users configure the speed at which messages are read through a computer or telephone interface. However, Cisco requires an add-on product (Personal Assistant) to access Outlook contacts and calendar information through a TUI. These features are standard in Communité, and we added them to the cost estimate provided by Cisco.
Users also can access their single message stores from a browser. And as with Communité, Unity's client application supports handheld devices powered by Pocket PC. Although it does not support Palm OS or RIM Blackberry, Unity has additional support for Windows CE. However, there is no PIM (personal information manager) integration with Act! or Goldmine, as is found in Communité. Unity PIM support is limited to Outlook.
Once you have the supported platforms down, Unity delivers UM in fashion comparable to Communité. You can listen to e-mail over the phone, check voice messages from the Internet, and route and screen calls to remote professionals based on conditions such as subject matter or sender.
Cisco provides network managers some powerful tools to monitor the Unity system's health. It uses detailed log (.csv format) analysis through a Unity administration tool to monitor health and diagnose problems. The administration interface can also generate reports on call handling and system usage and export them to HTML or Crystal Reports. In addition, Cisco has an ITEM that includes a suite of management applications for AVVID (Architecture for Voice, Video, and Integrated Data). ITEM can track and monitor Unity's health and alert administrators to potential problems to minimize service interruptions. It generates synthetic traffic to replicate network activity and presents the information in a dashboard view of gateways, switches and IP phones. NetIQ's suite of management tools for VoIP also can monitor Unity's health, but ITEM and NetIQ are add-ons to Unity that would increase the TCO for UM.
Unity's list pricing starts at $5,000 plus $132 per user for the UM server. That amounts to $31,400 for 200 users. But that's just the start. Sufficient resources for 200 users (approximately 16 ports) and two sessions of RealSpeak TTS total $31,000. Then there are the necessary IVR functionality in the Personal Assistant for 20 users and four-port speech recognition, which come to $8,445. This all adds up to $70,845. With a one-year service and support contract of $10,626.75 (15 percent of the software total), Unity weighs in at $81,471.75, or $407 per user.
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