What's Happening in Computer Telephony

NT makes its mark

Computer telephony (CT) has come a long way since its early days (in thelate 1970s), when disk storage was costly and processor power was available onlyin rack-mounted minicomputers. Back then, manufacturers of the first voicemailsystems faced a formidable task building them because virtually nooff-the-shelf hardware or software components were available. Thosemanufacturers had to create everything, including the underlying operatingsystems, from scratch. Telephony products were expensive, bulky, and not veryfeature-rich.

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

So what is computer telephony? It is the technology that letscomputer-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 toreach, enter it now"), fax-on-demand ("faxback"), and LAN-basedfax servers are among popular mainstream CT applications. But telephony doesn'tstop there. Desktop control of your telephone calls is a reality withMicrosoft's Telephony API (TAPI) for Windows NT and the availability ofTAPI-enabled applications. And with Microsoft Exchange, you can manage yourvoice, 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 anew, high-performance operating system standard for CT system design. Perhapseven more important, NT is rapidly gaining in worldwide enterprise popularity.Virtually every major CT manufacturer is now developing NT products that arefully compatible with NT LANs and related infrastructure.

With this article, I begin ongoing coverage of NT and CT. I hope to give youa window to what's happening in this dynamic industry segment, how it affectsyour business, and more important, how you can use the new CT technologies toimprove 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 throughNovember 2 was the sister to the main-event show for the CT industry--theComputer Telephony Conference and Expo--held annually in the spring. What madethe Demo Fall show unusual was that each exhibiting firm had the same boothsetup (and nicely done, I must say). The show was limited to 70 companies thatthe show promoters handpicked for the companies' interesting and cutting-edgeproducts. Each exhibitor had 10 minutes of fame on stage for a livedemonstration to the attendee audience.

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

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

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

Enterprise Interaction Center
Enterprise Interaction Center (EIC) from Interactive Intelligence is anall-in-one, NT-based communications server that handles a variety of corporatecommunications functions. It provides universal inbox capability with supportfor voicemail, fax mail, and email. With Microsoft Exchange (which is rapidlybecoming the standard unified messaging desktop front-end in enterpriseenvironments), you manage all message types from your desktop; so no matter whattype of message you receive, it shows up as a new message object in yourExchange Inbox.

What makes the communications server solution so compelling is that itprovides 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 meanssingle-point management for all these corporate communications functions.

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

This communications server architecture, shown in Figure 2, not onlysimplifies maintenance and support but has an additional benefit of eliminatingone of the thorniest problems CT manufacturers face: integration with aparticular phone system, or PBX. The vast majority of voicemail andauto-attendant systems are installed behind the PBX, giving those systems theability to freely transfer calls to any phone extension. The difficulty arisesbecause the interface details for each PBX can be significantly different, andworse, a PBX vendor can consider its interface proprietary. And without tightPBX integration, CT call handling can be less than perfect.

A communications server such as EIC integrates with the phone systemfunctions because it is the phone system: The CT functions work inharmony with your phones, making fast and reliable phone-call handling possible.With this high degree of phone control, you can program the system to provideefficient ACD functions because the system always knows when a workstation phoneis idle or in use.

The EIC is one of the first single-box communications solutions to hit themarket, but I do not expect it to be alone for long. I see this technology as ahot one that will become more popular in the near future.

Internet Xchange for FAX
For a long time, fax has enjoyed its position as a primary corporatecommunications vehicle for written materials. Although Internet email isthreatening to put a dent in this medium, fax is far from dead. In fact,the fax marketplace is still growing at a healthy 35 percent a year. Ironically,the Internet, with the NT-based Internet Xchange for Fax product fromNetXchange Communication, might pump even more life into fax. Here's how.

With more than 100 million fax machines worldwide, fax is literallyeverywhere. Because of this ubiquity, the average Fortune 500 company spends $15million a year on fax, with half of that amount for intra-corporate purposes.The NetXchange team developed a product that lets corporations deploy anInternet-fax gateway box at every corporate location that initiates or sendssignificant fax traffic. You send faxes to your local Internet-fax gateway node,and it receives and saves the fax locally, figures out which remote corporategateway node is closest to the destination fax number, and sends your fax asdata packets on the Internet to the receiving node. Once the remote sitereceives the fax, Internet Xchange for Fax places a local phone call tothe destination fax number, and delivers the fax.

If you have no per-minute charges on your Internet link, this process ofsending faxes is 100 percent free of transport charges. This capability canspell huge savings for heavy corporate fax users.

Internet Xchange for Fax goes further to save you money on your faxdelivery with another slick feature: The product lets you program phone rateinformation into the fax node boxes, so any Internet Xchange for Faxnode can compute the least-cost route for a fax it has to deliver. Let's say youhave corporate sites in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and you are faxing fromNew York to Santa Barbara, as shown in Figure 3. Internet Xchange for Faxwill figure out whether to dial and deliver the fax from your node in SanFrancisco or your node in Los Angeles. The cheaper route wins. This approachmeans industrial-strength money savings.

Fax-Internet gateways will get even more play as they gain popularity withInternet Service Providers. ISPs are beginning to offer lower-cost faxing as anew value-added service. This service currently makes sense for only the biggestISPs that have a Point of Presence (POP) in many locations. If your ISP investsin a fax-Internet gateway at each POP, you can send a fax, free of phonecharges, to your local POP for delivery at a significant discount to someonenear another POP for that ISP. Your next ISP bill will itemize your fax trafficjust as the phone company does now.

Internet Xchange for Fax's client lets you initiate cost-saving faxtransmissions from your desktop via Microsoft Exchange. The company also has aJava-based Web client that works with any browser on any platform. VirtualOffice, the next product, is due soon. It offers non-realtime voicemailcapabilities, so you can record a voice message, say, from your hotel room, andsend it to a remote corporate site without incurring long distance charges(assuming you can reach your ISP with a local phone call). This technology isgreat when you want to send a message that is not time-critical. Ultimately,what you send appears as a voice message in the recipient's Exchange Inbox.

If your company has significant fax traffic, you'll want to look at thistechnology soon. Internet Exchange for Fax is available, and it willsave you big money.

Sphericall
Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) telephone systems (i.e., PBXs) originatedin the regulated telephone industry. CPE systems are known for many things, butnot for being open.

Once you install such a system, your choices for additional hardware orsoftware are usually limited and overpriced. For example, proprietary telephonesets typically cost hundreds of dollars each. As Sphere sees it, an industrythat has been slow to react to emerging technologies and changing customer needsis holding you hostage.

Sphericall is a new kind of application that uses asynchronous transfermode (ATM) to carry voice directly to the desktop, as shown in Figure 4. Thisproduct lets you implement PBX functionality with client/server softwaredistributed throughout the network to enable workgroup telephony as a true LANapplication.

Special adapter cards and software in both the client and server extend thecapability of the network so that realtime voice becomes a new LAN data type.Sphericall is a distributed PBX application built around ATM LAN components.

Sphere Communications uses some cool technology that converts analog voicedirectly to standard ATM data packets, but the benefits are what drive this newproduct: You get more bandwidth to your desktop, eliminate the need for aseparate PBX or telephone wiring, get voicemail as a built-in service, and getthe ability to easily add users to the network (phone and data).

Sphere implements PBX call control as a distributed software application onthe LAN with full TAPI support. The company also supports Microsoft Exchange asthe desktop front-end for its voicemail messages.

Sphere's target market is workgroups with 10 to 100 users. As you addusers, you can add Sphericall servers on the LAN to increase outside linecalling capacity, provide redundancy and peak handling capacity, and runadditional TAPI applications for workgroups with special call processing needs.

For its product to compete against other communications server products,Sphere must address other media types, such as fax. But turning desktop voiceinto part of the LAN data stream is a novel idea that might catch on. In fact,another company at the show, InnoMediaLogic from Longueuil, Quebec, demonstratedATM network interface cards that let developers create their own version of theSphericall product.