December 1997

BY WILLIAM H. MATLACK, JR.

No one realized it at the time, but spring of 1995 turned out to be a major turning point for the computer telephony (CT) industry. Representatives from Nortel (Northern Telecom) and four other computer and telecommunications companies (Dialogic, Digital, Hewlett-Packard, and Ericsson) had been struggling with a variety of interoperability difficulties when they came to a frightening conclusion. The difficulties of getting CT products to work together without conflicts were, in fact, the single most significant barrier for the whole CT industry. It seemed to this small group that the lack of effective guidelines for interoperability of CT hardware and software components was well on the way to completely locking CT out of mass-market acceptance. It was determined that without proper guidelines in place, working out the complexities of CT systems integration would be extremely difficult.

This problem was compounded both by the growing importance of CT to organizations of all sizes and by the vitality of the technology itself. Workforce reengineering, downsizing, and the importance of effective customer service were forcing enterprises to find ways of doing more with fewer resources. Effective CT solutions promised answers to many of their problems. Automated communications, database sharing, and effective use of Internet and Intranet capabilities could give enterprises many of the tools they needed to compete. The market demand for effective CT solutions began to increase at the same time these very solutions were becoming more and more complex. Users knew what they wanted to accomplish with CT solutions, and for the most part it involved integrating multiple computing and communications applications with a variety of hardware.

Because CT held out the promise of greatly enhanced communications in all areas of business, the market was anxiously waiting for that promise to be fulfilled. New technologies in each area, such as client/server capabilities on the computer side and interactive voice response (IVR) on the telephony side, were giving enterprises a taste of the productivity impact that could be obtained, and they wanted more. However, the problems of interoperability were being left to developers and systems integrators to sort out as they tried to put workable solutions together. These integration problems prevented application-centric system designs where hardware and software could be freely selected to produce the most suitable solutions for a given application. The difficulties of configuring a compatible integrated solution were at cross-purposes to achieving maximum performance for that application.

System integration wasn’t the only CT market area facing serious interoperability handicaps. The hardware and software developers were being effected as well. This situation was leading to a proliferation of interface standards that would force the hardware and software developers to implement multiple interfaces for their products. This meant less talent and resources were available for developing core capabilities, shortening times to market, and lowering overall costs.

THE ECTF IS BORN
In drafting its charter, the Board of Directors of the Enterprise Computer Telephony Forum (ECTF) worked hard to maintain realistic expectations for the way the Forum would interact to create Interoperability Agreements that would function in the real world. They realized that the rapid growth of the technology was already producing a wide range of standards. Adding another set of standards to this mix would only contribute to the problem. In addition, there was a wide variety of needs to address — from those of very small to very large organizations.

Another challenge to offering practical solutions was insuring interoperability in heterogeneous environments so that applications could be implemented using different APIs, in different operating systems, yet still share common resources to establish end-to-end sessions. The ECTF’s organizational structure would have to allow all members to openly discuss and develop interoperability techniques for dealing with this diversity of technical approaches and needs. To do this effectively, the ECTF was designed, organizationally, to promote willing cooperation among its volunteer membership. The most important element was the requirement for consensus before any agreements could be published. More than any other element, broad-based consensus ensured that the Forum would work together to create true interoperability. Nothing short of that would succeed in bringing CT into the mass market.

The spirit of openness and cooperation was carried through in the Forum’s decision to place all of its intellectual property in the public domain. Anything published by the Forum would be non-proprietary and free for anyone to use. The ECTF set up a World Wide Web (WWW) site to provide free downloading of all the Interoperability Agreements and white papers published by the Forum. Thus, the ECTF was born. It is an industry organization formed to foster an open, competitive market for computer telephony technology. By gathering a broad group of suppliers, developers, systems integrators, and end users, the ECTF works to achieve agreement on multi-vendor implementations of computer telephony technology based on de facto and de jure standards. The Forum is a democratic, open, mutually beneficial, nonprofit, volunteer membership corporation. The ECTF’s vision of enterprise computer telephony is standards-based, multivendor computer telephony services that can be implemented in different ways to meet all the needs of the enterprise — whether individual services, group or departmental requirements, or company-wide needs. The ECTF, in its short two-year life, has become a focal point for working towards industry agreement on implementations of the various standards for CT to enable the entire market to grow.

The ECTF strives to reflect the collective wisdom of the computer and telecom industries through each of its Interoperability Agreements. It believes that a single media server model can support a variety of applications from multiple vendors, written to more than one API. One of the ECTF’s goals is to allow users to configure CT media servers in the same manner as today’s SQL servers, which may be efficiently driven by applications written to several different interfaces.

DEFINING A CT FRAMEWORK
The first step in designing interoperability into CT technology was an analysis of the CT market. Not surprisingly, the market was, and still is, very complex. The ECTF identified a number of specific issues that CT developers were facing on a daily basis. Existing software frameworks typically don’t provide support for the distributed aspect of CT development, and this is vitally important in the vast majority of solutions. Also, CT development demands support for eventdriven architectures as well as a deterministic response time environment. Finally, for CT systems to work within realworld environments, they must integrate well with other enterprise systems such as databases, directory services, e-mail, and others.

Before the ECTF began defining the CT model, applications were written directly to boards from specific vendors and resource Application Programming Interfaces (API). To guide the process of redefining the framework, the ECTF defined some very specific goals that had to be achieved.

FUNCTIONALITY IN EXISTING APPLICATIONS
Central to the concept of interoperability is that CT functionality should be easily integrated into existing, nontelephony applications. Any software vendor should be able to use the framework to add functionality to their products. For example, e-mail software vendors should be able to add text-tospeech and voice mail functionality to their products. Voice mail vendors should be able to add e-mail capabilities just as easily.

Client/Server Or ServerResident Implementations: Applications should be able to reside either on the single server containing CT hardware or in a distributed client/server environment.

Application Portability: Application developers should have the confidence of knowing that their applications will operate in a standard, predictable way across multiple client or server environments. Their expectations — that their compliant applications will operate with any compliant server equipped with the appropriate features required by the application itself — should be met.

Application Modularity: Multiple applications should be able to function independently within the CT framework without any knowledge of each other. This modularity is even more critical when applications need to cooperate on calls or share resources.

Call Sharing By Multiple Applications: Multiple applications should be able to share a single call in the proper sequence. As each compliant application finishes a call, it should be passed to the next application without conflicts.

Resource Sharing: Several applications residing in a common network should be able to share the telephony resources of one or more servers without knowledge of one another.

Scalability: CT systems should be able to scale the call capacity over a wide range of call volumes without changing any application code. Interoperability With Existing

Telecommunication Systems: All applications and servers should be able to interoperate with existing, proprietary telephone systems.

Interoperability With Existing Computer Systems: In addition to existing telephone systems, the framework should provide for interoperability with all existing enterprise computing systems such as e-mail, databases, directory services, and the like. Extensibility To Other Media: The framework should be designed to allow support for other media such as video or multimedia calls.

With this in mind, the ECTF designed a CT framework that would accomplish each of these goals. Since the framework would be taken from theory to reality through Interoperability Agreements, the agreements were also mapped into the design. This framework is described in an ECTF white paper entitled Architecture Framework, which has been released and is available for downloading on the ECTF Web site. This white paper describes an architecture (i.e., components and the manner in which they interrelate) for the CTI server environment. This framework is used to discuss the directions in which ECTF views the evolution of CT systems, to provide a framework for developing interoperability agreements for various components, and to describe the work programs of the various technical working groups chartered by the ECTF. The ECTF mapped out Interoperability Agreements that address each of the layers defined in the framework. The agreements define guidelines for product design that will foster interoperability.

S.100 MEDIA SERVICES APIs
S.100 defines a set of CT APIs that provides an effective way to develop CT applications in an open environment. Specifically, it defines a client/server model in which applications use a collection of services to allocate, configure, and operate the hardware resources they need. It allows for portable applications to be written by abstracting the implementation details of call processing hardware and switch fabrics. Those services are accessed through an API that is independent of the operating system. This allows applications designed to S.100 to be completely portable between S.100-conformant platforms.

S.200 MEDIA SERVICES PROTOCOL SPECIFICATION
S.200 is the wireline specification of the messages, or packets, between the application server and the resource server. These packets, otherwise known as Protocol Data Units (PDU) in Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) terminology, are data objects exchanged by protocol machines, or entities, within a given layer.

S.300 SERVICE PROVIDER INTERFACES
S.300 defines the Service Provider Interface (SPI) which provides standardized interfaces to the hardware resource cards in a CT server. The SPI is an addressable entity that provides application and administrative support to the client environment by responding to client requests and by maintaining the operational integrity of the server. It can also be thought of as a standard that lies between the API and the network. Conformance to S.300 allows CT solutions to support multiple vendor resource cards in a CT server. Cards may be freely mixed and matched within the server.

H.100 CT-BUS FOR THE PCI SPECIFICATION
H.100 specifies the hardware interoperability interface to provide interoperability at the resource board hardware interface. It defines the hardware interface between the resource boards themselves as well as between the resource boards and the server. H.100 provides information to implement a CTbus interface at the physical layer for the PCI computer chassis card slot. The card-level definition of the overall CTbus specification will drive new applications and help open new markets by providing flexibility to equipment manufactures, value-added resellers, system integrators, and those building computer-based telecommunications applications. The primary goal of this Interoperability Agreement was to free hardware developers from having to implement multiple interface versions of their products.

S.900 ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICES
In addition to the Interoperability Agreements that address specific levels of the CT framework, S.900 will address CT services management. It will specify management for four key areas: configuration management, performance management, statistic management, and fault management. These management specifications will be defined across the system/server level and the application level. S.900 is a work in progress. However, S.009 is a white paper that describes a framework for managing CT service providers conformant with the S.100, S.200 and/or S.300 specifications. All of these specifications, with the exception of S.300 and S.900 (which are works in progress) have been released and are available for downloading from the ECTF Web site ( www.ectf.org ).

ECTF STRUCTURE
To involve the over 70 member companies in the effective definition of an open systems environment for CT, the ECTF has organized itself into three committees: the Technical Committee, the Marketing Awareness Committee, and the User Committee. Representatives from member organizations staff each committee.

The main body of work is produced by the Technical Committee, which is further broken into working groups consisting of task groups. These groups work cooperatively to define and publish the Interoperability Agreements as well as white papers on interoperability. The Marketing Awareness Committee develops and implements marketing programs to increase the industry’s awareness of the ECTF, its mission, and its accomplishments on a worldwide basis. The User Committee, made up of CT end users, provides a feedback loop to the other two committees. They define user issues, needs, and concerns to help direct the work being done by the Technical Committee and the Marketing Awareness Committee.

William H. Matlack, Jr., is an independent writer and public relations consultant with over twenty years experience directing strategic marketing communications for a wide variety of high-tech companies. For additional information on the ECTF and to obtain ECTF documents, please access the ECTF Web site at www.ectf.org To inquire about membership, contact the ECTF at 510-608-5915 or direct email to [email protected].