November 1999

BY RICH TEHRANI

It’s said that perception is nine-tenths of reality, and like it or not, this is often true. Take a high school reunion, for instance. You receive the invitation, and it immediately gets you thinking. You’ve come a long way since high school — maybe a successful career, maybe academic honors or an advanced degree, or whatever you have decided defines “success” for yourself. But then, when you arrive, you realize that everyone still thinks of you as the math geek with the tape on his glasses or the girl who had the horrible home perm back before horrible home perms became all the rage. It’s like visiting your grandparents who never seem to realize that you’ve grown up and who sit you down for milk and cookies when what you really want is beer and pretzels.

And the same thing is true, on a broader scale, in business. TMC started CTI magazine three years ago to fill a definite vacancy in the industry — a publication that would objectively assess and report on developments in the then-young market for products that joined the previously disparate fields of telecom and datacom. We chose the name CTI for obvious reasons. Computer-telephony integration: there were mainframes, personal computers, and the data network on one side, and there were PBXs and the PSTN on the other side. An entire industry grew up around bringing together " integrating " these two networks and making them work as one.

I say "making" them work together because you and I both know that there was work to be done. Integration was the key that unlocked the potential of a single communications network, and it took skilled hands to turn it. At times it wasn't pretty, but those initial steps are often the hardest ones for a visionary to take. We took them — the industry and CTI magazine.

CTI was initially a technology that enabled PBXs and mainframes to communicate, and it really took off as an industry when Novell and Lucent had the foresight to develop TSAPI (Telephony Services Application Programming Interface), an open API that allowed developers to build applications that were to run on multiple PBXs with little or no modification. Prior to TSAPI, any development based on one type of PBX had to be recreated for each vendor's telephone system.

Once telecom finally opened up, hundreds of millions of development dollars poured into firms who tried to extend the bridge between telecom and datacom by inventing entire new product categories. The Internet telephony gateway, for example, allowed voice to be transmitted over IP networks. PC-PBXs allowed the full functionality of a PBX to be put into a PC, increasing usability and reducing costs. Enhanced services such as speech recognition and unified messaging were also spawned from the CTI industry. I would venture to say that almost everything exciting in the communications industry in the last five years has happened as a result of CTI technology.

Now, three years, some 36 issues, and thousands of products later, there still remains some integration to be done, but the world of voice/data convergence has evolved, and so has CTI magazine's coverage. Today, a typical issue has a rich blend of diverse editorial that helps you learn about communications products, technologies, and services. It seems that CTI has become the great enabler, a wonderful technology that makes it possible to stuff $1,000,000 worth of PBX processing power into a PC-based solution costing less that $50,000.

But tastes have changed, and we've grown up — industry and the magazine. You could say that we've substituted contact lenses for taped glasses and decided that home perms were probably best avoided. Products are more reliable and are easier to implement and use, and suddenly everyone pursues the vision that so few of us could see just a short while ago.

As the market has grown, we at TMC have come to realize that this magazine's coverage has even begun to exceed the term CTI itself — a term that is still very much what the industry is about, but which also conveys a sense of the past, of a basic link between a mainframe and a PBX, when the world of communications as we know it today is so much more.

Our mission then has been to come up with a name that encompasses the contents of the magazine and reflect the show more accurately. This is not a content change but rather an adjustment to more obviously match the focus of what we have been providing all along: objective and in-depth coverage of one of the most dynamic industries today.

You can well imagine how much time we have dedicated to this — meeting after meeting, with publishers and editors and artists and salespeople and all their families (or so it seemed at times) offering advice, ideas, directions, and so on. But when we boiled it all down, we realized that the communications market is what we cover and that the term "communications" was the simplest, most effective term for the space we are all working in. And more specifically, we cover the various solutions available within this market.

And we knew this was the best way to go. Subsequently, we decided that the name Communications Solutions™ is the most appropriate name for the magazine that will continue to cover the technologies, products, and services that you create and deploy, and which we've already been covering all along. And so, Communications Solutions™ will become our new name as of January 2000, making this magazine the millenium baby of the communications industry.

Now, with no apology for the past (after all, we can still pull out the yearbooks now and again and laugh at ourselves and admire our tenacity in the face of so many naysayers), we at TMC are once again positioning ourselves on the cutting edge of an industry that continues to grow, to change, and to make it easier for us all to communicate with each other.

I love this expression. As a former MIS director I had to use it often to make sure my users understood why I valued training and why they should as well. To truly understand and benefit from anything, we must really and truly understand it. And to fully understand any topic, it is imperative that you participate in it and get your hands dirty. It's the difference between being a passenger and actually driving, or between watching someone ski and actually skiing. There is no substitute for hands-on experience.

This "learn by doing" approach is exactly why we have so many live demonstrations on the exhibit hall floor of CTI™ EXPO, December 7-11 in Las Vegas. From learning centers focusing on Linux CTI and Wireless CTI to a next generation telco in a booth to the Office of The Future and a live CRM demo, there is really something for everyone. Here are the brief descriptions of the attractions as well as some of the participants that we've signed on so far. This list will no doubt change, so please check our Web site for updates and additions.

MEET THE COMPANIES TEAMING WITH TMC TO EDUCATE YOU
Six Learning Centers
These learning centers will focus on the most important technologies affecting communications today.

Linux CTI: This will be an awesome learning center! I can't wait to see it myself. Open source finally comes to telephony. Participants so far include White Pine, who make a variety of video conferencing and collaborative computing products; Quicknet, makers of the Internet Phone Jack; and Aculab, one of the DSP resource board makers that has thrown its full support behind this new and exciting platform.

Testing/Development: Hammer and Teltone will be demonstrating their testing and network simulation technology respectively, while Artisoft, Brooktrout, Pronexus, and Envox educate you on the latest in development tools.

CT Media: The latest open telephony standard for building truly open client/ server communications systems, and the first major standard in the industry to have the backing of all the major industry players and Microsoft and Intel. Participants will include Dialogic, one of the major architects of CT Media, as well as many of its partners. As of this writing, we can also expect Telekol to show their latest unified messaging technology.

Next Gen Call Centers: Expect leading edge demos from CosmoCom, ATIO, Telephony@Work, and Aspect Communications.

Wireless CTI: Expect the latest in handhelds and palm-based computers from a wealth of participants.

Office Of The Future: Get a glimpse of the state-of-the art office of the future. Praxon will be demonstrating their voice/data switch (an IP-based PBX); PakNetX will demonstrate their IP telephony-based call center solution. Picazo will show their PC-PBX products in action. Microsoft will show their latest software products, GN Netcom/Spectrum Technologies will show their latest headsets, and Romak (the supplier of the furniture at TMC's headquarters) will demonstrate their latest furniture designs.

Next Gen Telco In A Booth: We have so many things in the works, and the technologies and services we want to show you evolve daily. Come to the show to see it for yourself!

Two Live Call Centers On The Show Floor
At our last show in D.C., the live multimedia blended call center sponsored by CellIT and its partners was a huge hit. The agents in CellIT’s call center made and received over 11,000 calls in just 2 days! Plus, their solution looked awesome — nicer than any call center I have visited. Oak-based “glass house” cabinets housed truly state-of-the-art voice over ATM and voice over IP technology that eliminated the need for an external voice-only switch. Expect CellIT to top their D.C. live call center debut with a working call center that will connect to a live CRM Demo sponsored by Quintus.

The latest addition to the U.S. call center market comes from Vocalcom, a company that is well known in Europe, and who will be making their U.S. debut at CTI™ EXPO in Las Vegas. To announce their U.S. presence, they will have a live, working call center on the show floor.

Vocalcom’s technology is a PC-based call center solution, which can connect with your existing CTI-enabled call center products such as switches, or can be the switch itself. The interface of the call center solution is quite slick and acts as a front end to many of the call center features you would expect. Scripting, skills-based call routing, e-mail routing, a strong statistics package, and call blending are all included. Vocalcom touts its solution as a “smart customer interaction” solution and it seems to be exactly that. Attendees will be able to view all of these technologies as well as interact with the agents on the show floor. A screen will allow you to witness exactly how calls are routed to the appropriate agent. CTI™ EXPO is proud to host Vocalcom’s debut, and we hope you will come welcome them to the States.

Live Enterprise CRM Demo
Quintus Corporation, a leader in CRM products and technology, has joined forces with both TMC and CellIT to allow attendees to view the ultimate CRM demonstration right on the show floor. There is simply no place else where you will be able to witness an office of the future, a live multimedia call center, and a live CRM demonstration working together in a single location.

We have been working for months to ensure that you will learn exactly what you need from CTI™ EXPO. If there is anything important happening in the world of communications, you will learn about it at CTI™ EXPO. There really is something for everyone.

We look forward to seeing you in Vegas and, as always, if you register online, your registration is free, saving you $25. I hope to see you there.

PS: If you haven’t been to Vegas in a while, you are in for a very pleasant surprise. There are new properties being constructed on a regular basis, and these resort hotels are too beautiful to describe. We were able to negotiate incredibly low hotel rates with the Bellagio and Mirage as well as with our primary show hotel, the Las Vegas Hilton. This means that not only will your stay in Vegas be incredibly exciting — it will be extremely reasonable as well.

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