What's Happening in Computer Telephony

Computer telephony (CT) has come a long way since its early days (in the late 1970s), when disk storage was costly and processor power was available only in rack-mounted minicomputers. Back then, manufacturers of the first voicemail systems faced a formidable task building them because virtually no off-the-shelf hardware or software components were available. Those manufacturers had to create everything, including the underlying operating systems, from scratch. Telephony products were expensive, bulky, and not very feature-rich.

Today, the CT industry is flourishing. Industry analysts expect the total CT market to reach $7.9 billion by 1999. You can attribute part of this dramatic growth to new, widely acknowledged standards, widely available PC hardware components from industry leaders such as Dialogic, and an ever-growing list of vendors offering software and turnkey solutions.

So what is computer telephony? It is the technology that lets computer-based systems automatically answer, handle, and even make phone calls. Voicemail (that often-used time-saver that everyone loves and sometimes hates), auto attendant ("If you know the extension of the person you would like to reach, enter it now"), fax-on-demand ("faxback"), and LAN-based fax servers are among popular mainstream CT applications. But telephony doesn't stop there. Desktop control of your telephone calls is a reality with Microsoft's Telephony API (TAPI) for Windows NT and the availability of TAPI-enabled applications. And with Microsoft Exchange, you can manage your voice, fax, and email messages all from within one program--the Exchange client.

NT is a significant event on the CT industry landscape because NT provides a new, high-performance operating system standard for CT system design. Perhaps even more important, NT is rapidly gaining in worldwide enterprise popularity. Virtually every major CT manufacturer is now developing NT products that are fully compatible with NT LANs and related infrastructure.

With this article, I begin ongoing coverage of NT and CT. I hope to give you a window to what's happening in this dynamic industry segment, how it affects your business, and more important, how you can use the new CT technologies to improve your business communications. I define some common industry terms in "Computer Telephony Terms Defined," page 78.

Report from the CT Demo Fall '96 Show
The Computer Telephony Demo Fall '96 show in Orlando October 30 through November 2 was the sister to the main-event show for the CT industry--the Computer Telephony Conference and Expo--held annually in the spring. What made the Demo Fall show unusual was that each exhibiting firm had the same booth setup (and nicely done, I must say). The show was limited to 70 companies that the show promoters handpicked for the companies' interesting and cutting-edge products. Each exhibitor had 10 minutes of fame on stage for a live demonstration to the attendee audience.

The Importance of NT
NT is influencing the CT industry in a major way. Virtually every presenting firm at the show either had an NT-based product or had one in the works. At the show, I sat with industry veteran John Alfieri, vice president of Sales and Support at Dialogic, the industry's largest peripheral producer. I asked him for his NT views.

"In the customer premise and enterprise server segment of the computer telephony marketplace, my feeling, very strongly, is that it's going to be NT," he said. "I see Microsoft staying extremely focused on maintaining NT momentum. Dialogic believes in open standards, and NT is a great environment for open CT development. We are doing all we can to enable our customers' success on the NT platform."

Indeed, a good percentage of the manufacturers on the show floor are using Dialogic components in their NT-based products. Other leading component vendors such as Rhetorex and Natural Microsystems are singing the same tune, so NT is fully here in CT. Let me highlight some products from the show.

Enterprise Interaction Center
Enterprise Interaction Center (EIC) from Interactive Intelligence is an all-in-one, NT-based communications server that handles a variety of corporate communications functions. It provides universal inbox capability with support for voicemail, fax mail, and email. With Microsoft Exchange (which is rapidly becoming the standard unified messaging desktop front-end in enterprise environments), you manage all message types from your desktop; so no matter what type of message you receive, it shows up as a new message object in your Exchange Inbox.

What makes the communications server solution so compelling is that it provides corporate Private Branch eXchange (PBX) functionality at its core. Also, EIC offers voicemail, automated attendant, Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), and fax server functions in the same PC-based system. This facility means single-point management for all these corporate communications functions.

Figure 1 offers the conventional picture: Workstations connect to the corporate LAN, and each user has an individual phone extension. Conventional wisdom says you need a separate, optimized box for each communications subsystem such as the PBX, voicemail, and fax server systems. Each subsystem has its set of maintenance utilities, procedures, wiring, power requirements, and so on.

This communications server architecture, shown in Figure 2, not only simplifies maintenance and support but has an additional benefit of eliminating one of the thorniest problems CT manufacturers face: integration with a particular phone system, or PBX. The vast majority of voicemail and auto-attendant systems are installed behind the PBX, giving those systems the ability to freely transfer calls to any phone extension. The difficulty arises because the interface details for each PBX can be significantly different, and worse, a PBX vendor can consider its interface proprietary. And without tight PBX integration, CT call handling can be less than perfect.

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