BY RICH TEHRANI

PORTABILITY
A case in point is Odin TeleSystems, a company that has been in the CTI board level market for years. They were initially focusing on Europe and are now making a tremendous push Stateside. Although Odin TeleSystems has a complete portfolio of voice, fax, and telco interface boards, what caught my eye was something much smaller. Odin's Thor-2 PCMCIA is a dual T1/E1 adapter on a PCMCIA card. Packing 160 MIPS, this card is a breakthrough in form factor and ingenuity. With a laptop or a handheld computer, you can now have the voice processing power that was once only available in a desktop machine.

Odin TeleSystems ships the product with a software driver and an API. The THOR-2 is software configurable to handle either T1 or E1, depending on your needs. This makes it an ideal candidate for mobile testing applications, but really the number of possibilities is limitless. One unique application I can think of is the world's smallest 60-line ACD or PBX. With software from Selsius or PakNetX, some H.323 telephones, and a network hub, you can construct the world's smallest 60-line distributed PBX or ACD, with the number of stations limited only by CPU processing power. This product has many telecommunications applications that will surely deserve press as they develop. If you are interested in developing on this intriguing platform, drop Odin a line. If you are using this card to develop a unique application, please drop me a line.

Odin tells me they are about to release a new PCMCIA card that has a total of 8 T1/E1 adapters on it. That means a handheld Internet telephony PBX with 240-line capacity is right around the corner!

ADAPTABILITY
Whenever I describe CTI in layman's terms I explain that CTI allows you to combine the power of the computer and telecommunications industries. The "I" stands for "integration," and it is what allows the computer and telecom industries to communicate. Perhaps the simplest product that brings these two worlds together is the Call Recorder from DoubleTalk Software. The adapter, which connects between your telephone set and your handset and which is about the size of a large pack of gum, also connects to the "line in" port on your sound card. Once connected, DoubleTalk software allows you to record any telephone conversation regardless of PBX type. It even works with hotel PBXs.

One great application of this product is that it allows for recording conversations and then e-mailing them to someone else. The Cc: and Bcc: fields in e-mail make it an incredible productivity booster, and now you can e-mail a recorded conversation to keep others informed or to ask them to follow up on a project. Unified messaging already allows you to treat fax and voice mail as e-mail; now you can treat your conversations with the same flexibility.

Another great application I've found for the Call Recorder is interfacing between various voice messaging platforms. A case in point is the various voice mailboxes I have set up: one at work, one in my home office, and one on my cellular telephone. Almost every day I receive a message on one of these systems that I need to forward to someone else on a disparate system, but until now I couldn't. With the Call Recorder, I can dial into any voice mail system and record the message and e-mail it as needed. I look forward to the day when this process becomes more seamless and is encompassed in all voice messaging platforms. Two standards - AMIS and, more recently, VPIM - will hopefully help alleviate this problem in the future. Please see www.ema.org for more information on the VPIM standard.

INTEROPERABILITY
Although not a formal product announcement, the news that Cisco and VocalTec  are working together to assure interoperability between their two gateways is nothing short of incredible. The announcement further details that this interoperability will be based on H.323, version 2. It took years before vendors in the PC and the traditional telephony markets decided that interoperability was important. Internet telephony vendors know it's crucial now, and they are almost all working to ensure the future success of Internet telephony standards. Of all the companies working on these standards, I must give a great deal of credit to VocalTec. It seems that every week I read about another interoperability announcement between their products and others in the market. This is tremendous news for a market that is just a few years old and growing like crazy.

What could be better than two industry leaders pledging to support Internet telephony standards? In this case, the answer is: five industry-leading companies pledging to support Internet telephony standards. BT, DGM&S Telecom, Microsoft, Nortel Networks, and Siemens have formed an industry consortium, the Parlay Group. Their initial objective is to develop a common, open API - known as the Parlay API - to accelerate open Internet telephony application development. For more information, please visit www.parlay.org.

Notably absent from the Parlay announcement is Lucent, who recently announced their own APIs as part of their Internet Protocol Exchange System announcement (IPES). Lucent's IPES describes two IP-based PBXs, otherwise known as voice/data switches. Please see www.lucent.com/ipes for more information.

Routers And Embedded Operating Systems
Microsoft's strategy is to put Microsoft operating systems at the edge of every network - the voice network, the data network, and any other network you can think of. Obviously the more servers you sell, the more money you make, and this seems like a straightforward strategy. If you extend this logically, you realize that another company has a similar strategy that is just as straightforward. Cisco Systems owns 85 percent of the router market and has recently announced that they are rapidly getting into the Internet telephony business. Acquisitions of companies like Summa 4, a programmable voice switch vendor, and Selsius, an Internet telephony PBX vendor, means that Cisco now has leading-edge voice and Internet telephony PBX technology in their arsenal. Microsoft NT server has become the de facto operating system in the PC-based PBX business, and more recently in Internet telephony PBXs referred to as voice/data switches.

The question becomes: How will Cisco move forward with their voice strategy? Although I am not privy to this information, I can speculate. The main drawback of a router-based voice product versus an NT-based product is that NT has an open programming interface as well as an arsenal of development and application testing tools. These tools make short work of augmenting PC-based voice switches with add-ons such as ACDs and Web call back. So the inherent openness of a PC-based OS gives PCs a huge advantage over a router-based solution.

Obviously, Cisco wants their Internet telephony switches to become increasingly popular, and to do this they must make sure that other vendors start adding value to their products. The best way to do this is with a partner program and development environment. Partner programs are all the rage these days. At CTI Expo we have five partner pavilions from companies such as Microsoft, Natural MicroSystems, Lucent, Brooktrout, and Dialogic. These partners add value to the core products supplied by each of these respective companies. Cisco should soon be focusing heavily on a partner program in this space.

Compared to a router, a Windows NT PC is like a bulky bloated machine. Even as PC form factors decrease, NT requires a bulky monitor and keyboard. If only Microsoft could produce a complete computer offering that has the form factor of a router or other sleek device and that could still run Windows 98- and NT-based programs. If this were possible, MS would have a real winner on its hands. Windows NT would have to be embedded in the computer platform itself to make such an idea realistic.

As luck would have it, Microsoft announced on November 3 the release of Windows NT Embedded 4.0. This release is good news for the CTI development community. The embedded systems market has been highly fragmented for years, and the traditional embedded operating systems that are in use are excellent and take small RAM footprints. The problem is that a CTI developer can't port PC apps easily to this environment. With Embedded NT, they now can.

Microsoft has never been known for producing tight code that runs in small amounts of RAM with moderately fast processors. Also, this new embedded OS does not seem to be real-time, and many embedded applications require the OS to perform functions predictably in real-time while servicing many interrupt requests. So initially you would think that MS has no chance to enter this market. But RAM prices and processor prices are plummeting, and time to market becomes a bigger differentiator by the day. Time to market is key, and there are thousands of Windows development tools that are all available to Windows NT Embedded 4.0 developers. Embedded developers should definitely keep an eye on this announcement, as should CTI solution developers. Of special interest is the fact that Natural MicroSystems, a leading CTI board level manufacturer, is one of the alpha testers of this OS and is quite happy with it. They have been able to leverage their existing voice platforms on this new embedded OS with minimal fanfare.

Stay tuned for the market share battle between Microsoft and Cisco. This is a pretty bold prediction, but it makes sense given the above acquisitions and announcements.

The amount of activity in the convergence space is truly staggering. But it is not just the sheer number of products that amazes me, it's the genius of the developers who produce these new technologies. "Paradigm shift" is an over-used phrase, but that is really what these CTI products represent. I am fortunate to be involved in and disperse information about an industry that helps us all become more productive, more profitable, and ultimately, more successful.

We are ecstatic about the incredible growth of CTI Expo. As I write this, we are 12 days away from the CTI Expo Fall 1998 in San Jose, California, and the pre-registered attendance numbers are staggering. The Web traffic on our site relating to CTI Expo alone is straining our Internet connection just to accommodate the surge of attendees registering and learning about CTI Expo online. We will easily top 12,000 attendees for a first-time West Coast show. Incredible! We have already geared up for CTI Expo Spring 1999, May 24-26 in Washington, D.C. This is our first ever event in D.C., and we can't wait to bring CTI Expo to our nation's capital.

At CTI Expo Spring in Baltimore we expected 3,000 attendees and were blown away when beyond our wildest expectations over 8,000 showed up. First-time shows rarely have this number of attendees. The CTI market is on fire. The product announcements keep getting more impressive, the new players become more aggressive, and the attendees are continuously overwhelmed by the depth and breadth of new products at CTI Expo.

CTI Expo Spring 1999 will have five learning centers, but I must keep you in suspense about these until the next issue, where a cover story will tie in quite nicely to one of our new learning centers. Expect huge news on our next cover.

Instead, I would like to focus on two keynote speakers from companies that are constantly positioned by the media as huge future competitors. Of course the companies I am referring to are Lucent and Cisco. As telephony begins to travel with more frequency over IP networks, Cisco has begun to stake a big claim in the converged voice/data territory. Lucent has also introduced a wealth of products that encompass converged voice/data networks.

Lucent's Barbara Reeder, the VP of Global Marketing Communications, will be speaking on Wednesday, May 26 at 10:00 a.m. Barbara has been in the telecommunications industry for over 20 years and is intimately involved in Lucent's role in the world of voice and data convergence. Lucent has a whole host of voice/data breakthroughs such as Internet telephony-enabled PBXs, Internet telephony development tools, voice/data switches, CTI products, and advanced call center technologies. There is perhaps no better visionary to outline the future of the convergence of voice and data than Barbara Reeder of Lucent.

Cisco's Peter Alexander was one of the keynotes at our first ever CTI Expo Spring 1998 in Baltimore, MD. Since then, Peter has been promoted from the Internet Telephony division of Cisco to become the director of Enterprise Marketing. Cisco's decision to put Peter with his years of telephony experience in such a crucial role in the organization demonstrates their desire to become a leader in voice switching just as they are a leader in the router market.

This year, Peter will be giving the keynote on Tuesday, May 25 at 10:00 a.m. Lucent and Cisco will no doubt be fighting hard for market share in 1999. CTI Expo is the best place to learn how the visionaries at both Cisco and Lucent view the world of converged voice and data, and to find out how you can benefit from it.