Formed in late 2002, Orative has drawn on the experience of several industry veterans, including David Ladd - who helped create and market the original voice mail solutions at VMX, back in 1979 - to address the key issues corporate users have with voice communications.

“Many people in business spend much of their time bouncing between meetings,” says John Drewry, Orative’s VP Marketing. “Typically they end up with brief intermissions during the day to check voice mail and make a few calls. These calls in turn often mean leaving messages in voice mail boxes. Usually these brief breaks are not sufficient to clear all calls and many messages are not addressed until the evening. Often this exchange of messages can goes back and forth for several days before the parties end up talking live.”

The goal of the Orative system is to help corporate users better manage their voice calls and dramatically reduce the time spent trying to communicate.

“The Orative application provides a mechanism to provide context around a call,” explains John. “So not only can the recipient can see who is calling but se what the call is about, its importance and priority allowing them to respond more appropriately.”

The Orative solution consists of a server that is hosted by a corporation and a small client application which resided on a phone (currently a Series 60 or Brew based handset.) The client application provides the user with a presence enabled list of personal and corporate contacts as well as real-time integration with calendar systems.

For call management the system uses a combination of pre-call data exchange over the packet network which can then be followed by a voice call carried over the mobile network. So a typical exchange could involve the initiator of the call checking the other parties availability, if they are not available to take a live call the caller could send a call request identifying the issue they wish to discuss and its importance and urgency. The recipient will then see the request and can take appropriate action, which may be to answer the call, reply with a time when they can take the call or simply leave the call to go to their message service. If the call was delayed to a specific time the Orative Solution can automatically create and send reminders of the call (assuming the parties are present as expected), reminders include dynamic links to the number to call. Other reminder capabilities include conference calls where the reminder also delivers call ID and password information if it is needed.

“The client is designed to provide the user with a complete communications dashboard,” says John. “While users could see their text based messages in one place now with the Orative solution they can see all their voice messages to and tackle responding in a priority order not simply on the basis of when the call was received.”

Given that the Orative Solution is initially being targeted at smartphones employing traditional phone design the UI has been optimized to account for the fact that extensive text entry is slow on these types of devices. “We have employed extensive use of predefined lists for information like call types to ensure that the Orative Client can be operated with one hand, essentially the same way a Series 60 phone was designed to be used,” says John.

Orative have architected its solution based on today technology. “In our initial release we knew it was important to target technology available in phones that are in the market, using network technology which is widely available,” says John. So for example we use GPRS in GSM but also leverage SMS, we can tune aspects of the server and client based on the network capabilities an operator can provide. Equally our solution is ready to exploit future capabilities such as simultaneous voice and data, SIPP or voice over IP as those technologies become generally available.”

In addition to the desire to use proven available technologies Orative wanted to make the system available to the widest cross section of users, which was why Series 60 was chosen as one of the two launch platforms. “Our view is that the majority of corporate users will still be using devices which are essentially phone like,” says John. “When you look for platforms which have broad support from both the industry and amongst users with the technology enablers required by the Orative Solution Series 60 is an obvious choice to access a broad majority of enterprise users. If the demand exists we can easily delivery to other form factors and platforms.”

While Java based phones would seem an obvious choice to address a mass market John explains that the current Java implementation simply do not provide the functionality necessary to deliver the Orative Solution. “Java remains a very attractive option for future implementations of Orative but there will need to be both functional improvements and more standardization in handset implementation before it becomes truly practical,” says John.

Orative is currently testing its solution, it will be giving a preview at the forthcoming Symbian Partners event in San Francisco on 4th December and expect to release the Orative Solution commercially, with support for Series 60 and Brew, in early 2005.

More information on the Orative Solution can be found at www.orative.com.