BY KEVIN MAYER

The communications gold rush, like the California gold rush, brings to mind more than the prospect of quick riches. It also inspires reflection. No sooner do we hear of the latest dot-com celebration, than we ask ourselves, however quietly, if such euphoria can be long sustained. Dare we hope that the current dot-com excesses will lead to any enduring good? Or will we soon recover, as if from a debauch, hung over, soberly reflecting on the folly of chasing tawdry dreams?

While I am by no means inclined to applaud excess (and excess does very well without my support, to be sure), I strongly suspect that in the case of the communications gold rush, excess will ultimately serve a greater good. A windfall here or a fabulous stroke of luck there, or even a devastating loss or two, won't alter the general course of events now being set in motion.

To ascertain the general course, it is necessary to see past the surface of things. Take the California gold rush as an example. It is not merely the story of a few people who, by luck or guile, managed to land on top of a pile of money. Nor is it merely the story of a hapless rabble that undertook an arduous trek and endured hardscrabble conditions, all for no real gain. Rather, it is the story of how an impetuous adventure may lead, however indirectly, to a very real and enduring boon.

TELL ME WHY
Many of the fortunes attributed to the California gold rush were amassed not by prospectors, but by those who outfitted the prospectors. Analogously, in the communications gold rush, fortunes may accrue to those supplying the necessary technology, and not just those who would exploit it.

A Web page describing the California gold rush includes a couple of colorful examples: A New York butcher who walked to California, opened a meat shop in Placerville and made enough money to start a meat-packing plant in Milwaukee. His name was Phillip Armour. One of Armour’s Placerville neighbors was an Indiana man who made and sold wheelbarrows. Later, his family got into the car business. His name was John Studebaker.

In the case of the communications gold rush, today’s counterparts to yesteryear’s outfitters may very well be the ones to prosper. Such outfitters would include vendors active in the convergence space, including those traditionally known as computer telephony or CTI vendors.

DON’T LET IT BRING YOU DOWN
For better or worse, computer telephony or CTI has always known a special kind of success. Derivative success. Most conspicuously, CTI basked in the reflected glow emanating from call centers. Only the call center had the call volumes sufficient to justify the trouble of implementing CTI. Other manifestations of CTI, whether for general business or residential use, languished.

And yet, since the early 1980s, there have been those who have hoped that CTI would finally come into its own. And those hopeful souls just keep on hoping. Still, after all these years, there are those who claim, once again, that we are entering the long-awaited “year of CTI.”

The year of CTI will never come. I don’t mean to say the sort of functionality associated with CTI won’t triumph. CTI will triumph when it embeds itself so thoroughly that nobody would think of calling attention to it. In other words, CTI will never be more triumphant than when it is entirely unremarkable.

I BELIEVE IN YOU
It may seem unfair that success so complete should also be so quiet. But that is the nature of many technologies, or at least those technologies that reach maturity. And how CTI has matured! At one time, the emphasis in CTI was on proprietary links between switches and mainframes. (You could say this stage of CTI was about as advanced as relying on the Panama canal to hasten your arrival in the west.) Nowadays, it’s more fashionable to talk about convergence, or voice-over-data schemes. (Analogous, shall we say, to the laying down of rail for the transcontinental railroad?)

Ultimately, what matters are the communications solutions that tie everything together: the world of telephony (the predictable and established East Coast, if you will) and the world of data — and everything to which you might add a dot com (the Wild West). Communications solutions are about relegating enabling technologies to their appropriate place, consolidating and subordinating them to any given individual or corporate vision. Communications solutions are about asking what might be achieved, once the necessary (and ultimately unremarkable) connections are in place. The realization of such solutions will be the focus of this publication during (and after) the gold rush.