November 1998

BY RICH TEHRANI

Recently I have been agonizing over the simplest of matters. I work regularly with a few individuals in my office, and it would help me a great deal to know when these people are on the phone. Once upon a time our MIS department, in conjunction with a few TMC Labs engineers, were nice enough to install a TSAPI-based call control and monitoring software package on all our computers. This package allowed us to graphically transfer calls and monitor six or more phones, so that I was easily able to tell which phones were on or off hook. About a year ago, our telecom manager installed a new call accounting package and had to disable our wonderful TSAPI call control server due to a resource limitation of our PBX. As with everything else in life, you don't know what you have until it's gone. I recently realized that I miss our CTI call control software a lot.

I am considered to be one of the most knowledgeable people in the company regarding our current phone system, but even I regularly lose a party when I try to conference people together. I never lost a single call with the GUI-based CTI software. Worse yet, many other people in my office may never understand how to conference calls, despite repeated attempts by myself to explain how to do it. Telephone interfaces stink, but that's not news to any of us.

YOU CAN'T GO BACK
In order to get the TSAPI server back up and running, we would need to call our interconnect, order a new component for our PBX, and reinitialize the software. But the person who really knew the phone system is no longer with the company. Our lab guys are always reviewing products at a frenzied pace, and I don't dare disturb them for something that isn't really important. Beyond that there are budgetary issues -- I just can't spend thousands of dollars on a whim.

I also have another problem --I am considered a PC power user in our office. There was a time when I used to work on Adobe Photoshop, Quark Express, Corel Draw, and many other RAM hungry programs simultaneously. MIS hated me (they may still) - my computer was rife with problems. It got to a point where MIS would respond with, "Rich, just close a few programs and the problem will fix itself." Of course they were right - sometimes. I guess I am still a power user, as I can have 25-35 programs and pieces of e-mail open at a time. So installing the call control application on my desktop is hardly the most appealing thing I can think of.

An Unacceptable Compromise
I decided we could worry about installing CTI hardware/software in next year's budget. Until then, I could just program line appearances on my phone so a little red light would be lit when the parties in question were on the phone. So I called MIS and asked them to come show me how to program a line appearance on my phone. "Well Rich," they told me, "the guy who knows the phone system isn't here any more." Of course, we all know the saying that MIS guys will run as fast as possible away from telephony - this time was no exception. Again, I could have bothered the TMC lab guys, but I felt guilty pulling them away from testing advanced Internet telephony gateways and application generators to play with the lights on my phone.

I am the publisher of CTI magazine, I thought, it is good for me to stay with the technology and keep myself involved in all facets of telephony. All I have to do is find the manual for the phone and bingo, I will be in business. In engineering school I assembled so many electronic devices - calculators, CPUs, graphics subsystems. This would be as easy as cake.

Well, I suppose it is really easy to do, but I have never done it. My system of organization leaves something to be desired, and beyond that, I am continually bombarded with press releases and trade show invitations. Let's just say that at the bottom of one of my stacks of mail and publications is a manual on how to program my phone. It was never a priority I suppose.

SEEING IS BELIEVING
So imagine my surprise when I was at a recent trade show and saw a demo of Selsius Systems' new full-blown, IP-based PBX with Web browser programmability. Connected to the central hub was a slew of their Ethernet/IP telephones. Selsius was the first company I became aware of that actually built Ethernet and IP interfaces directly into the back of the telephone. This was pretty revolutionary stuff - Internet telephony equipment that does not require a PC or gateway. One day all phones will be built this way.

During the course of our dialogue I asked them how they program the buttons and lights on the phone. "Oh let's take a look," is all they said. They double-clicked on their Web browser and immediately came up with a PBX configuration screen. They clicked on one of the phones and then clicked more specifically on one of the lines/buttons on the phone and typed in the address of another extension. A quick save and it was done. Perhaps it took a minute or less. I salivated. I love my job - but I really love my job when I can let our readers know about how much more productive they can become with new technology.

There I was, agonizing over how to fix this problem, and I realized that with the Selsius PBX all I had to do was program the system through my browser.

So why couldn't I do this with my own phone system? I've seen the PBX configuration screen - it's a dumb terminal interface (quite frankly, it has an atrocious user interface by today's standards). I would hate to have to figure out how it works, but I could launch my trusty VT 100 emulator, dial into the PBX, and start searching for line appearances. Given enough time, I could program the switch directly.

The TSAPI call control software we used to have was great for transferring calls and the like, but I could never program the line appearances on the phones through it. There is nothing to stop our PBX vendor from changing the interface so that it is easily accessible through a browser. Sadly, many PBXs don't have this feature, which of course means that when the PBX expert in the company leaves, a consultant is necessary for the simplest telephony modifications.

CHALLENGING (AND CHANGING) THE PBX
This got me thinking about the nature of the PBX and the industry in general. In many ways, the chasm between reliability and flexibility still remains a deep one, although both large and small vendors are working to close this gap. (See my discussion of Rockwell's Transcend, a PC-based ACD, in the May 1998 issue of CTI.) While reliability is important, the industry is moving forward. We will soon get to a point where reliability will be a commodity, and ease of use and open interfaces will become a differentiator.

Of course, in an effort to compete with the smaller and perhaps more adaptable companies, most big PBX companies are working feverishly on getting products out the door that address today's usability deficiencies. It remains to be seen how quickly they will catch up. And while PBX vendors are looking at the small and nimble PC PBX companies and the like, they can't take their eyes off the big boys either.

We have been predicting that Cisco will eventually come into the PBX business for years, and it seems that their entry into this space is right around the corner. Worse yet for all PBX vendors is who their new competitor is. Peter Alexander, who gave an excellent keynote presentation at our initial CTI™ EXPO in Baltimore, was once in charge of Cisco's Internet Telephony division. Peter has literally had decades of experience in telephony and is now the senior director of Enterprise Marketing. The fact that Cisco chose someone with such a strong telephony background to head up this division should not be taken lightly.

I rarely discuss people in this column: In fact, we rarely discuss people at all in CTI because this is a product and technology magazine. So if I do choose to discuss a person in this column, it is very significant. Peter is very hands-on in his organization and he is very technology savvy. His promotion will have serious ramifications for every PBX vendor.

Furthermore, we should all keep in mind that TAPI 3.0 is coming out soon. TAPI will not only handle call control as it does today - with built in support of IP telephony and QoS, we can look forward to many companies coming into the IP PBX space. Of interest is that Cisco is working on a partner program with open router interfaces. Couple TAPI 3.0 and open Cisco routers and hubs and all you need to develop a new PBX is a copy of Visual Basic.

CTI and Internet telephony technologies together have lowered the barrier of entry into the PBX manufacturing market to just over the purchase price of Visual Basic. This is analogous to when the Macintosh computer with Aldus PageMaker software in the early 1980s opened up the field of publishing to any person who could afford a Mac.

So the future for the PBX makers, as I see it, is to differentiate themselves with easy-to-use interfaces as well as systems integration that is second to none. One day, telephony switching hardware will be a commodity. The PC market went through a similar phase in the early 1990s. Customers for the first time ever were so comfortable with their PCs that they decided that they would rather purchase them through the mail than go to the store. No doubt, we will face a similar situation in telephony.

So now that I have finished this column perhaps I should take a minute or two to find that manual. Nah - I figure with such a bright future ahead of the telephony industry, why should I even worry about programming a phone today that will soon be obsolete?

For over 15 years I have avidly read magazines that focus on both the computer and telephony industries. There was a time when I was reading or reviewing 50 publications per month! While reading, I always noticed a major contrast between the telephony and computer magazines. As an MIS director, I carried a great deal of purchasing authority upon my shoulders. I came to rely on magazines in the computer field to help me make these purchasing decisions. When I needed to make a telephony purchase, however, I could never find a telephony magazine that I could trust - a magazine I could rely on for unbiased, non-commercial product reviews.

I noticed that the publications that gave me rock solid advice were the products of publishing companies that had invested in a product-testing laboratory. The computer and networking magazines all had labs, while the telephony magazines focused only on round-ups of products with information that could be readily found on a company's Web site. Sometimes one company would be reviewed with glowing praise, while another would be omitted for no apparent reason. Something always seemed fishy about these reviews, and the industry as a whole had a tough time believing their conclusions.

Subsequently when I needed to purchase products in the telephony field I was forced to test a wide variety of products myself, wasting precious time and resources. Some years back it took six months for us to test three different fax server products internally. We gave up - We didn't like any of them - We wrote our own package. Think how amazing that is. Telephony and computer telephony products are orders of magnitude more difficult to install and operate that the most complicated PC product, yet I would read a 100-page review on various PCs in a computer magazine, and a unified messaging product in telephony magazines would receive three paragraphs of glowing praise with nothing to back it up.

TMC first realized this tremendous void in the telephony industry.

When we launched CTI magazine, I decided that this would be the first magazine to perform unbiased product reviews with the utmost attention to detail. Furthermore, each and every review would have the full integrity of a laboratory staffed by engineers who have nothing but the reader's best interests at heart. Years of frustration in MIS taught me exactly what we needed to produce in every issue to help our valued readers make informed purchases.

It is this sense of responsibility to you, the reader, that has allowed CTI, and now all TMC publications, to be accepted as industry benchmarks. Our engineers stubbornly refuse to accept anything but perfection from the products they review. They agonize over product literature, installation screens, and documentation for countless hours looking for errors, omissions, and other problems that could make your life miserable as a reseller or purchaser of CTI products.

You will notice that TMC Labs has attracted so much attention from our readers that other publishing companies have decided to give the whole lab thing a whirl as well. We are flattered to see that others in the industry have decided that TMC Labs is something worth copying. As a reader, you must demand the utmost from the publications you read. Rest assured that all TMC publications will continue to evolve and provide you with the information you need to become more successful in your business. TMC publications will help buy the right product the first time. We will continue to lead the pack.

TMC is committed to providing publications of the highest caliber and utmost quality. TMC produces only three magazines - I am personally involved in the creation of each magazine, and my ultimate aim is to read every page of every issue before you see it. TMC is one of the few remaining independent publishers in the telephony field. We take pride in our editorial and we continue to give you publications with information that you can trust. Readers tell me that they stake their careers on what they read in TMC publications.

We thank you for your continuing loyalty. Furthermore, we appreciate every testimonial that you send us. As you would expect, we are always trying to improve our publications, and some of our best improvements have been the result of suggestions from our readers. We would love to hear what we can do to make your job even easier. As always, I encourage you to e-mail me at rtehrani@tmcnet.com, and please include comments on how we can improve our publications even further. A few minutes today can save you weeks of frustration in the future.

Will all these revolutionary changes going on in telephony, where can you go to quickly and easily find out about all the vendors who will be supplying the advanced PBXs of the future? CTI™ EXPO, of course: December 1-4, 1998, in San Jose, California. Our PC PBX learning center was so successful in Baltimore in the spring that we have decided to carry the center forward intact in the fall show as well. As you may recall, learning centers are areas on or near the show floor that are set aside for vendors to objectively educate you on new technologies. These learning centers are the only place where you can go to learn about technology without feeling undue pressure to sign purchase orders on the spot.

FALL 1998 CTI EXPO LEARNING CENTER DESCRIPTIONS:
PC PBX
When television commercials advertise LAN-based Xerox machines, it only makes sense that LAN-based telephone systems can't be far off. The PC PBX - also known as a "communications server," "PC-based PBX," or "un-PBX" - transforms an organization's entire black-box, bulky, and proprietary telephone system into a simple software suite running on off-the-shelf PCs with minimal special hardware. By doing so, computer features limited solely by developers' creativity become a part of your telephone network. With every .WAV file ring of your networked telephone - if you even have such a thing, since the "telephone" may simply be a wireless headset attached to your PC's infrared port - a screen pop will display who is calling, a link to the caller's database file, the caller's Web site, recent messages from the same caller (fax, e-mail, and voice mail), as well as the option of sending the caller to your own voice mail, call center, or somewhere else. Much of what you've dreamed a networked phone system could do is here today, and many things you never thought of will be here tomorrow - but the most important part of the puzzle is the PC PBX.

Internet Telephony
Network telephony - whatever form the network takes - is the stone that can topple the long-distance Goliaths. Some estimates place internal communications as high as 75 percent of an organization's total telephone, data, fax, and video conference communications - but why should you pay a traditional service provider to talk to yourself? By sending packets of data over a computer network instead of monopolizing individual circuits for a non-data enhanced network, even basic long-distance telephone calls become exponentially cheaper, with the ability to add, in real time, any kind of data you can conjure. Once developers of IP telephony hardware and software figure out how to minimize or eliminate packet latency and loss (and once political issues of taxation, legality, and profit sharing are resolved), circuit-switched proponents might as well market leaded gasoline.

Web Call Back/Call Through
Webmasters preach that the next wave is dynamic HTML, programmers preach Java, and designers preach layers and codeless WYSIWYG editors. Ask a CTI guru, however, and you'll hear another answer: Web call back and call through actually increase the chances of success for Internet commerce. Someday soon, every important Web site will have a "communicate" icon which, when clicked on, will either reserve your immediate spot in a call center's call-back queue or, better yet, place you in the call center's Internet ACD - in other words, initiate intelligently routed and IP-based live communications with an agent, who quite possibly is working remotely. Web call back and call through are technologies that make single-click video conferencing and data sharing a reality. They also present a way to increase site profits - the technology can lead to actual "commercials" while your "callers" are holding in queue.

Remote Access/Telecommuting
Today's remote access and telecommuting ethnologies stand to reduce the time spent at the office and increase productivity on road trips. The technologies that connect remote employees to the office - whether they are call center agents, executives, field technicians, or sales managers - are coming to market at an unprecedented pace. Not only will home offices, branch offices, and road warriors have super-fast access to the LAN; that access will also provide for security, dynamic data refreshing, video conferencing, and more. Most importantly, it will ultimately be seamless to the customer, who wants service now and has no reason to care where you are in real time.

S.100 Application Development
Through the use of open APIs, developers can write programs directly to the servers and allow resources to be shared by multiple applications like PBXs, ACDs, predictive dialers, and programmable switches. CTI will grow at a faster rate once open client/server-style standards become commonplace. Today, however, nobody knows whether that standard will be Microsoft's TAPI, S.100 (designed by the ECTF, Enterprise Computer Telephony Forum), a combination of the two, or something else entirely. At this learning center, you'll hear from a variety of S.100 advocates implementing the standard in an equal variety of client/server applications.

CTI™ EXPO is possible thanks to the participation of many companies in the CTI industry. Some companies participate as exhibitors. Others dispatch representatives to speak in seminars. And, of course, many bolster attendance. A few companies, however, participate as corporate sponsors.

As you might expect, the corporate sponsors have made a special commitment to the industry, and feel it is appropriate to demonstrate this commitment through their support of CTI™ EXPO. For our part, we feel it is appropriate to accord special recognition to our corporate sponsors, not just for their participation in any particular show, but for their consistent and profound dedication to the industry.

We invite you to investigate these companies for yourself, to appreciate how large a stake they have in the CTI industry, and to recognize how much they have to contribute to this industry's success. When you're at the show, we recommend you visit their booths to investigate the depth and breadth of their offerings. In the meantime, however, we leave you these brief notes on each or our corporate sponsors:

The Amanda Company (Booth #528; www.taa.com)
As a leader in the development and manufacturing of PC-based voice processing solutions, the Amanda Company realizes that product life cycles are short, and the call processing technology of today will be inadequate for rapidly changing communications' needs in the future. The company's product strategy is clearly innovative. The use of a common, standardized platform throughout the line creates a migration path between each of its products providing an investment insured for the growth of any company. As businesses grow and communications needs change, Amanda continues to meet the specific needs that any customer might have with respect to their requirements, desires, and/or given stage of business life cycle by providing a broad range of communications solutions.

Amanda's product line consists of three core systems: Amanda@SOHO, Amanda@Work and Amanda@Large. These systems are incrementally expandable to accommodate the communications requirements of individual users, small to medium-size businesses, and large corporate environments requiring enterprise-wide call management solutions.

Dialogic Corporation (Booth #1008 ; www.dialogic.com)
Dialogic Corporation, a leading manufacturer of high-performance, standards-based CT components, boasts a customer base of more than 5,500. Moreover, Dialogic claims that its products manage more than one-third of all telephone, facsimile, and multimedia calls answered by computers worldwide.

Dialogic provides foundation technologies as opposed to end user solutions. As such, it relies on a network of application developers, value-added resellers, and OEMs to incorporate its technology into solutions custom-tailored for specific end-customer business needs.

Dialogic business partners represent the full range of CT application development. Specific application areas include Telco and wireless, Internet telephony, fax broadcast, speech recognition, unified messaging, switching, information access, and advanced intelligent networks.

Specific Dialogic technologies leveraged by Dialogic partners include:

• CT Media - an open software platform for designing standards-based telecommunications servers. With CT Media, developers are free to mix and match disparate software and hardware services.
• CT Connect - a call control server capable of connecting a wide range of telephone switches to a variety of data processing environments. CT-Connect client/server software technology supports industry-standard hardware, operating systems, network services, and call control programming interfaces such as TAPI, TSAPI, ActiveX, and DDE.
• DM3 Mediastream Architecture - a resource architecture designed to provide a new level of reusable extensible CT resource capability for both open Signal Computing System Architecture (SCSA) and other CT system implementations. The DM3 architecture supports multiple firmware resources from multiple vendors, and offers the DMFast(tm) development environment for the rapid development and integration of call and media processing resources.

Melita (Booth # 428; www.melita.com)
Melita, a leader in designing, building, and delivering call center solutions, holds 34 patents, which cover such areas as CTI, voice processing, and predictive dialing. Call centers in virtually all industries have turned to Melita for telemarketing, customer interaction, collections, and customer service technology. More than 600 companies in 20 countries on six continents use Melita call center technology.

Melita systems are designed to work and grow with a call center's existing architecture. By relying on its building block technology, Melita helps protect its customers' investment. Each piece of a Melita system is function-specific, so customers don't have to abandon an entire system to expand or adopt the newest technology.

At the show, Melita will highlight Enterprise Explorer, a fully distributed customer contact solution. Enterprise Explorer enables companies with multiple call centers around the world or single-site call centers to control critical communication processes from a central location. Melita Enterprise Explorer's mixed-media servers allow companies to integrate Melita Enterprise Explorer with their existing infrastructure to create custom-tailored solutions for more easily processing incoming and outgoing customer contacts. Mixed-media servers can be deployed at multiple sites using industry standard ATM or voice over IP. Melita Enterprise Explorer expands the concept of call center customer contact to include any type of mixed-media service including voice, Internet, and fax.