BY RICH TEHRANI

As another year comes to a close, magazines in various industries do their best to prepare their readers for the future of the industries they serve. CTI magazine covers many topics — from unified messaging and wireless technology to Internet and LAN-based telephony. The challenge we face is to weed out the wheat from the chaff, to separate the hype from the real advances in our industry. Fact is, every new technology we look at looks great in our conference room as part of an hour-long presentation. But then we are faced with deciding if the technology is really that fantastic, or just the sales pitch.

CTI magazine constantly struggles to keep its readers informed of the truly important industry developments objectively, without undue pomp and circumstance. Our goal is to provide our readers with the best resource through our publications, newsletters, and trade shows for our audience of purchasing decision-makers in the computer and communications fields. In this Outlook, I will present some of the key technologies you should seriously consider implementing in 1998.

A BIT OF HISTORY
First, a look back. To those readers new to our pages, a brief history on computer-telephony integration (CTI) is in order. The traditional computer and telecommunications industries had long been very different entities with vastly different modes of operation. Telecommunications was dominated by large, monopolistic bureaucracies thickly swathed in red tape. In sharp contrast, the computer industry, financed by venture capitalists and Wall Street, has made time-tomarket a deciding factor in determining corporate success. Increased power, speed, and value are the buzzwords of successful computer companies. But, the lines are blurring.

THE FIRST APPLICATION OF CTI
In the mid 1980s, a technology known as least cost routing came to prominence, and was embedded into many of the PBXs of the time. Using a microprocessor and rate lookup tables, the PBX would pick the least expensive long-distance carrier based on the time of day and location of the called party. This first application to combine the power and functionality of the computer and telephony industries, was the first step in what would come to be known today as computertelephony integration.

THE CALL CENTER
The synergy of these two ubiquitous technologies became obvious to equipment vendors in the call center market of the early 1990s. Large mainframe vendors began establishing links to the more popular PBXs prevalent in most call centers. These links allowed caller look-ups in corporate databases using the caller ID information captured by the PBX. Call center agents could now be presented with accurate information about their customers’ buying habits and preferences before they even answered the call. The boost in productivity was astounding.

Outbound call centers were also able to leverage the power of CTI. By taking advantage of predictive dialing technology, efficiency in call centers increased on the order of 300 percent. The predictive dialer was basically a computer containing voiceprocessing boards that would call a list of telephone numbers and discern a person picking up the telephone from a busy signal or fax machine. Only the telephone calls answered by a human being were passed to call center agents, thus saving countless hours of unproductive calling time for the agents. These technologies were very expensive, but could be justified in a call center environment where dealing with the telephone was the primary duty of all the agents in the center.

THE INFORMAL CALL CENTER
As mainstream operating systems began to embrace CTI, product costs were drastically reduced. In the early 1990s we saw products that allowed informal call center agents to use their telephone systems much more efficiently and productively. Using a PC GUI (graphical user interface) allowed these agents to take advantage of many productivity enhancing telephony features intuitively and with little training. Just who is an informal call center agent? While opinions are varied, anyone who uses the telephone to conduct at least some part of their business, and is not a formal call center agent, can be considered an informal call center agent. In other words, everyone can benefit from the productivity boost proffered by CTI technology and products.

WHAT TO PLAN FOR IN 1998
The following product areas will see significant growth in 1998 and beyond. If you are serious about your business, you should begin evaluating and migrating to these technologies in the near future. Internet Telephony (Or IP Telephony) IP is rapidly becoming the ubiquitous protocol for all data transport, including voice and video.

Resellers, you will see tremendous opportunities to integrate this new technology into existing corporate data networks. Entrepreneurs looking for new opportunities should seriously think about setting up a network of Internet telephony gateways and becoming longdistance resellers.

Corporate IT and telecom professionals, stay on the lookout for products that will transport voice over your existing LAN. You will have many options for providing your users with simultaneous voice/video and data to the desktop. Sphere and CellIT (featured on the cover) are two of the first companies to provide voice over ATM to the desktop. They will be followed by a slew of companies delivering voice over ATM and IP to the desktop. TAPI 3.0 from Microsoft should add a great deal of fuel to this fire. ISPs are perfectly poised to become telcos by simply installing an IP gateway at each of their POPs. ISPs can provide not only local access to customers but can sell bandwidth to other companies that are providing long-distance calling services.

Unified Messaging
Integrating your voice, video, fax, and e-mail is a natural. We at CTI magazine write about it constantly. In fact, we rave about it. Most of corporate America has yet to take advantage of this essential technology. The majority of the vendors in this segment are small players who have been involved in a “waiting game” as major corporations have been reluctant to embrace this new technology without support from other “big guns.” Lucent’s recent acquisition of Octel gives Lucent access to unified messaging technology developed in conjunction with Microsoft. Better yet, Lucent’s PR and marketing machine will hopefully start educating corporations on why they need to implement this technology immediately. Nortel has even begun to run a series of CTI ads on mainstream television. They also have a unified messaging solution. With any luck, they too will take a more active marketing stance with unified messaging in the upcoming year.

Server-Based PBX
Whatever name you ascribe to it, this product represents a huge paradigm shift in the PBX market. The serverbased PBX (PC PBX) is to the traditional PBX what the file server was to the mainframe. This technology unlocks customers from proprietary (read $$$) PBXs, allowing them to take advantage of the simplicity of configuration and enhanced functionality that the PC platform has to offer. PBX manufacturers, like Comdial and Mitel, are already producing PC PBXs and we will soon see other mainstream computer makers and large PBX makers with such offerings as well. As in the unified messaging scenario, the entry of big players will only legitimize and expand this rapidly growing market.

CONCLUSION
These are just a few of the key technologies that will have a profound effect on the world’s business communications. These are tried and true technologies and should not be considered bleeding edge. Resellers, service providers, and IT and telecom departments have many important choices ahead of them in the upcoming year.

CTI magazine will continue to provide you with timely, in-depth information — without undue hype — through our product reviews and articles on all of these important and developing technologies. If you are not familiar with these technologies, you need to know about them immediately. Our CTI electronic buyer’s guide at www.ctimag.com/cti/ctibg.htm can help you find the companies that produce products in all of the above categories. Contact these companies and get references if you like. These technologies work today and are being used by companies to improve productivity, reduce costs, and increase efficiency. Now is the time to do your homework, so that you will be prepared to take advantage of the rapid advancements CTI technology has to offer.

Sincerely, Rich Tehrani
President and Group Publisher
CTI magazine

Our parent company, Technology Marketing Corporation ( www.tmcnet.com ), has been running trade shows in the call center market since 1986. In fact, we were the first company to sponsor a trade show in the call center market. Originally named TBT (Telemarketing and Business Telecommunications) our show evolved through the years to become TCCS (Technology for Call Center Solutions). As the market has continued its evolution, so have we. CTI EXPO is the evolution of a trade show that once targeted only the call center market. As the market has grown to focus on the underlying technology upon which the call center market stands, so has our show. Perhaps the best way to explain this evolution is to present the conference tracks that will be contained within the show. As you can see, we have truly evolved a call centerspecific show into an exposition that covers a much broader topical range.

PreConference

• Principles of Telephony
• Voice, Fax, Video, & Data Convergence
• Introduction to CTI in the Call Center
• Human Resources for Management
• Telemarketing/Call Center StartUp Clinic: A “How To” Guide Conference
• Internet Telephony
• Application Development & Programming
• CTI Technology
• Reseller, Integrator, & Developer Opportunities
• Call Center Solutions
• Human Resources & Management
• Telesales & Teleservices Post-Conference will be an industryspecific, call center conference day.
• Healthcare Industry
• Banking & Financial Industry
• Telecommunications Industry
• Insurance Industry
• Utilities Industry

In addition to these conferences, we have developed a special FREE session titled:

How To Become The Most Profitable CTI Reseller
This session will focus on everything a new reseller needs to get into the extremely lucrative CTI business and will also help existing CTI resellers better prepare themselves to sell the products their customers need and want. Whether you are an existing computer VAR or an Interconnect or want to start your own business selling CTI products, this session will give you the tools you need in one 90-minute, FREE session. This will also be an unprecedented opportunity for you to network with other resellers in a relaxed, extremely educational forum.

For a more detailed look ahead at CTI EXPO

I am constantly bombarded by the many exciting new products flooding our industry. So much so, that at times I feel I don’t have the time to take as close a look at these offerings as I would like. I’d like to share with you a brief outlook on some of the products which have grabbed my attention lately.

MICOM/Tech Data
Recently, MICOM Communications Corp., a Nortel company, announced it has teamed with Tech Data Corp.. Under terms of the agreement, Tech Data will become a national CTI master distributor for MICOM’s V/IP voice over IP phone/fax gateway products in the United States and Canada. This is the same product that received recent accolades in the October issue of CTI. Tech Data has an active base of more that 55,000 VARs and they believe that up to 12,000 of these VARs will potentially sell this product. This partnership signals Tech Data’s introduction into the CTI market, and we welcome another major computer distributor into our rapidly growing market. Another major computer distributor, Merisel, should also soon be making waves in the CTI market.

TouchWave
TouchWave has introduced a product called WebSwitch. WebSwitch is a device that looks like a network hub but has ports for a network connection, POTS lines, and telephone stations. Each TouchWave unit ($8,500 MSRP) can handle 8 CO lines and 16 physical extensions as well as 40 hours of voice mail. The configuration interface is a standard windows GUI, not a text-based interface common on most PBXs. Multiple units can be connected together over any IP network and the system can scale to a total of 150 users. They are using a stackable network hub paradigm which is quite novel. We are looking forward to a closer look at this product!

PhoNet Communications, Inc., ) has released a distributed network PBX called EtherPhone. Similar to products from Sphere and CellIT, EtherPhone transmits telephony over the packet or data network but is not limited to ATM. A variety of cards in the EtherPhone family allow you to establish a telephony server as well as telephony clients eliminating the need to run a separate network and telephony line to each desktop.