April 1998

Standards And Scalability: The Present And Future Force Behind CT

BY NORMAN SCHWARTZ

Set your clock back a decade or so. Remember the promises that were being made by the telecom market pundits? Computer telephony (CT) was going to unlock the barriers that had long separated the blending of two unique (and mostly diametrically opposed) technologies, the switched telephone system and the computer.

In theory, the experts said, CT would make it possible to have a simple phone call trigger a stream of events that would culminate in all of us being able to have our calls identified before the call was even answered. We would see database information magically appear on a computer screen when a call arrived at a business. Callers would converse with the CT system in plain English. Faxes would be read to a subscriber who was nowhere near a fax machine. And now that the basic know-how was at hand, all this was just around the corner. The same pundits looked into their crystal balls and saw explosive growth for the CT industry — from zero to billions in record time. Wall Street gushed about the great things to come from these vendors. CT would overcome fundamental business problems, like companies being stuck with incompatible islands of technology that couldn’t communicate with each other, or hyper-expensive acquisition costs that diminished the value of their investment in applications.

CLOSED SYSTEMS AND CLOSED DOORS
Then reality reared its ugly head. In their zeal to capture market share, and to ensure the long-term viability of their products, early CT providers fell prey to short-term thinking. They made their applications, software, and hardware proprietary, and therefore, almost impossible to integrate. This, they reasoned, would insure continued loyalty (and royalties) from the customer. Unfortunately, what it really did was prevent the CT industry from becoming the fast-growing, mainstream technology everyone had predicted.

Complicating the picture further was a computer voice and telephony board industry still in its infancy. Even a few years ago, state-of-the-art hardware and firmware just didn’t allow for the delivery of great multiples of anything. Single-line voice boards and single-circuit front-end telephone interfaces were common. Limitations of the chips embedded on the boards, and of manufacturing processes, kept vendors from being able to offer meaningful simultaneous sessions. Systems that required much bandwidth were large, cumbersome, prohibitively expensive, and worse yet — single tasking. All this meant that voice mail systems did only voice mail and interactive voice response (IVR) systems did only IVR.

Most discouraging of all, the CT systems couldn’t share information with each other, or offer the caller seamless services. Customers had to invest in separate, expensive, closed systems for each function they wished to perform. CT was not yet ready to go mainstream. And so, its wonderful promise went unfulfilled.

CT: THE TIME IS NOW
Roll forward to 1998. All the roadblocks that kept CT from speeding into the mainstream a decade ago have finally been pushed aside. Proprietary hardware has given way to open system standards — and the flexibility and lower costs that come with them. The rise of the Internet and corporate intranets is making a huge impact. And today’s hardware design makes it possible to pack heretofore unheard of numbers of ports onto a single board. In short, CT systems are finally ready to take their place in a company’s single, unified telecommunications network. And today’s CT industry is finally ready to fulfill its early promises, from the smallest mom-and-pop shops to the largest enterprises.

HARDWARE COMES OF AGE
The hardware has finally caught up with CT. State-of-the-art advances in hardware design and manufacturing are allowing leading telephony board manufacturers to expand the number of simultaneous events they can offer on a single board. There’s no longer a need for separate systems to handle different CT functions. The underlying architecture (both hardware and software) being tested and delivered today will allow a single board to offer fax, voice, data, and speech recognition — literally, a "universal everything" board. System designers can now pack as many as 120 simultaneous voice con versions onto a single board, and hence, into a single slot in the computer. Boards are more often scalable, meaning the hardware, firmware, and software are designed to support a range of simultaneous sessions, from as few as one to as many as hundreds. With scalable products, a manufacturer can put small systems onsite, knowing the customer can upgrade and grow while protecting their original investment — a true loyalty builder.

System developers can place multiple boards into the platforms and lace them together using accepted standard industry buses, creating ultra-large systems. Scalability also frees customers from buying more than they need now just to get the feature functionality they want.

THE REACH OF THE INTERNET
Another new wrinkle is the powerful role the Internet and corporate intranets play, not just in CT systems, but in communications in general. According to Frost and Sullivan, the market for telephony solutions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks will more than double annually over each of the next three years, based on the availability of innovative and cost saving solutions like toll free long distance calling and Web enabled call centers and help desks. Companies are making major improvements in both the quality and the cost of their interoffice communications using intranets. IP telephony solutions with tremendous market potential — either already on the market or in development using products available today — include:

Toll Free Long Distance Via Internet Gateways
Phone-to-PC or PC-to-phone operation can take place with one gateway. Phone-to-phone PC operation can occur with two gateways. To offer international long distance service using gateways, an organization or service provider can host one gateway in each country. By bypassing the international connect charges — even paying in-country long distance rates — the configuration costs significantly less than traditional circuit switched service.

Web-Enabled Call Centers/Help Desks
In the call center, companies can strategically link their call centers and Web sites, creating enormous opportunities for electronic commerce. A call center gateway allows Web surfers with properly equipped multimedia PCs (typically with the right browser plugin) to connect to an existing Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) with Internet phone technology. Customers accessing a Web site can immediately speak with a customer service agent to get information or place an order.

Internet Fax
Traditionally, fax messages are sent via the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). Calls are billed per minute, incurring the highest charges during the business day. These same fax messages can be delivered using the Internet at a significant savings. By using the Internet to deliver fax traffic, documents can be delivered without the need for long distance calls.

STANDARDS OPEN IT UP
CT hardware and software standards have made it possible to build systems with openness, scalability, and flexibility to combine features and technologies from different companies — all of which were missing from earlier products. Today’s CT systems are built on industry accepted hardware and software protocols, ensuring interoperability among parts from numerous manufacturers. CT system developers are now able to mix and match both hardware and software. Unprecedented bandwidth is making businesses stand up and take notice. Functionality and features from a wide range of applications will not only be able to share information with each other but, because of standards, will be able to live in and on the same platform, driving down costs and opening up markets (and checkbooks) like never before.

ECTF Standards
CT standards have come a long way, with groups like the Enterprise Computer Telephony Forum (ECTF) encouraging their widespread acceptance in the CT community. Essential CT standards include ECTF S.100 for software and H.100 for hardware.

The ECTF is a nonprofit organization that brings together suppliers, developers, systems integrators, and end users to discuss, develop, and test interoperability techniques for CT solutions and publish interoperability agreements. The ECTF S.100 specification allows CT applications to share media resources and interoperate with existing call control architectures. S.100 helps define a robust, scalable, networkable CT services platform and architecture, expressed as a series of working agreements. On the hardware side, ECTF standards include ECTF H.100 CT Bus for PCI and ECTF H.110 CT Bus for CompactPCI, both of which simplify the challenges for system developers and integrators using mixed hardware platforms.

Microsoft’s TAPI
De facto standards for call control and networking, such as Microsoft’s Telephony Application Programming Interface (TAPI), are also a driving force in bringing the benefits of CT into the mainstream. TAPI significantly helps drive down the cost of ownership for CT systems.

Networks themselves, long the domain of computer mystics, are now commonplace. Also in wide use is standards based networking software that makes it easy to jump onboard the Internet or build intranets — all with powerful new standards based, scalable components. The key body developing IP telephony standards is the VoIP Forum activity group of the International Multimedia Teleconferencing Consortium (IMTC). Made up of more than 40 major computer and telephony companies, the VoIP Forum is defining technical guidelines for two party, real-time voice communications over IP networks, including provisions for compatibility with traditional telephone service networks via telephony/IP gateways.

CONCLUSION
Think about where CT was a decade ago. Now consider where it is today. Were the soothsayers and diviners wrong? Not really. Was CT ahead of its time? No. Was demand low? Not at all. However, there were two key elements missing from early CT systems: standards and scalability. And without these two elements, the promise of CT never quite became reality. Today, CT standards and scalability are well established. Everything is in place for CT to finally deliver on its early promises — and then some.

Norman Schwartz is director, product marketing, for Dialogic Cooperation’s Media Business Unit. Dialogic is a leading manufacturer of high-performance, standards based computer telephony components. Dialogic products are used in voice, fax, data, voice recognition, speech synthesis, and call center management CT applications. The company is headquartered in Parsippany, New Jersey, with regional headquarters in Tokyo and Brussels, and sales offices worldwide. For more information, visit the Dialogic Web site at www.dialogic.com.