BY RICH TEHRANI

Corporate America always has and always will view productivity as the most important factor in the success or failure of any business. Economists chart productivity continuously. Productivity directly affects margins, and margins affect profits. The road to greater profits is paved with increased productivity.

It may be hard to believe, but sometimes this basic point is overlooked. Consider the relationship between downsizing and profitability. The rewards of downsizing are so immediate, it seems some people forget that reengineering efforts are ultimately ineffective unless a greater degree of automation is implemented. In fact, some of the recent profitability problems faced by companies today stem from inadequate investments in technology, back when headcount was being slashed. (My thanks to Barbara Reeder, vice president of Global Marketing Communications at Lucent, for bringing my attention to this point.)

CTI is perhaps the greatest form of automation that there is. Whether CTI is used to develop a calling card platform, an international callback application, or a unified messaging system, this technology enables us to leverage the power of computing, networking, and telephony coherently.

Since CTI encompasses so many fields, it means many things to many people. That's part of what makes CTI so exciting. On the other hand, it can be frustrating to explain CTI to someone new to this industry: screen pop; LAN-based telephony and video; programmable switch applications (such as prepaid cellular and international callback); Internet telephony; text-to-speech; unified messaging; fax-on-demand; fax broadcast - the list goes on and on, and all of these, collectively and individually, are examples of CTI. However, these products have one thing Corporate America always has and always will view productivity as the most important factor in the success or failure of any business. Economists chart productivity continuously. Productivity directly affects margins, and margins affect profits. The road to greater profits is paved with increased productivity in common: they allow us to automate in ways never before possible. Thus, it follows they offer novel ways to increase productivity.

PRODUCTIVITY BOOSTERS
Unified Messaging
With the amount of time corporate employees spend using both the telephone and computer, it makes sense that any productivity gains involving these two tools would not only be welcome, but even necessary. Already, wireless phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) allow us to carry our telephones and computers wherever we go, enabling us to always be in touch. The combination of these two disparate productivity tools has proven to be exponentially more powerful.

A good example is unified messaging: a single inbox for voice, fax, and e-mail. The benefits of this technology make it a must for every corporation. IS and Telecom departments take note - you must budget for a unified messaging system immediately if you don't have one already. To those resellers that are just getting into CTI, here is a wonderful opportunity to sell CTI technology that works and has a proven track record. Unified messaging is also coming of age as regards the Internet. There are many products that allow you to access your voice mail, faxes, and e-mail through a Web browser. MediaMail from Telinet is one such product. It's easy to see the benefits of such technology for business travelers. Web terminals will soon show up in airports, hotels, airplanes, everywhere - allowing those of us on the go to have universal access to our unified messages.

AT&T sells a wireless Web browser named the PocketNet Phone. You can receive a fax, develop a written proposal, and send them both to a colleague in another office for approval or comments from anywhere. Sure, this can be done without unified messaging, but it is time-consuming, unorganized, and expensive. Unified messaging is truly object-oriented messaging. You can finally focus on the message and not the medium.

Once we all have multimedia-enabled PCs and are enjoying the benefits of unified messaging, we will be able to take the next step and enjoy an even greater productivity boost - video mail. Voice mail and e-mail are fine when you need to tell your customer or vendor something, but what about when you need to show them something? This is a very subtle but important point. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a few frames of video must be worth a million. We have all left countless voice mails for our co-workers, asking them for a meeting as soon as they are free. In many cases, it's simply a case of showing them something. Of course, as soon as we meet face to face, an important call comes through. You take the call, and your co-worker leaves. This is a repetitive, annoying, time-draining process that can be eliminated with a camera and a multimedia PC. Simply press record and produce a video that explains your point. Your co-worker can watch the video and manipulate it as needed. What a time saver!

Video mail products exist today but most corporations have yet to take full advantage. This reminds me of how, in the '80s, people said that voice mail and auto-attendants were useless. "No one wants to talk to a machine," they said. Well, we have seen voice mail and IVR applications dramatically alter the way we do business. Video mail might just enjoy the same proliferation that voice mail did in the '80s.

Call Screening
Do you ever get calls from people that you don't have time to speak with? How about calls from someone you don't want to speak with? SmartScreen from Solopoint, TeLANophy from Active Voice, and Telephony Office Linx from Esna Technologies allow you to listen to your incoming messages as they are being recorded. Any caller can be pulled out of voice mail as needed. How many important calls have we all lost to voice mail? How many did we wish we lost to voice mail? You can have your cake and eat it too. This functionality should be on the desk of every person in your office.

Personalized Follow-Me
Connex from Xantel allows you to play a personalized message for individual callers and also set up a follow-me routing system. An example of this feature is playing a greeting when a caller calls. If there is no answer, the call is transferred to a secondary number. If again there is no answer, a secondary greeting is played. After that, if there is still no answer, you can be paged or the call will end up in voice mail. Octel offers many of the above features in a service named LiveConnect. The time savings alone will more than pay for this type of product or service over time. Products that allow you to communicate your status to callers while you are on the phone with another party are terrific productivity boosters. The ability to place someone in a queue, as opposed to automatically relegating them to voice mail, can improve the number of completed calls. For example, while you are talking on one line, an important call comes in. The caller hears a predefined message which tells them that you will be off the phone in a few minutes and to please hold. A second call comes in that you choose to send to voice mail. A third call comes in that you want to take. You tell them you will be off in five minutes, and to please press 1 to hold or 2 to leave a message.

Wildfire Communications has developed an administrative assistant product that understands spoken commands and speaks back to you. It can screen calls, route calls, and announce your callers, as well as conferencing you with other parties. This is truly state-of-the-art CTI. Com2001's TransASSIST gives your PC and telephone similar functionality. The technology works. It's not quite perfect yet, but processing power and algorithms are constantly improving. The products available today allow users to have a full-time assistant attending to their every telephone need and whim! The cost per seat rivals an assistant's salary for a month or two.

These are the tools that corporations need. They need these tools today. With the products becoming more powerful and less expensive, now is the time to dive right into CTI.

JUST ONE MORE THING: PC PBX REDUX
Our last issue had a major feature on PC-based PBXs. Small- to medium-sized offices should seriously consider a PC PBX solution for their telecommunications needs. It is a wonderful value for any business. There more and more vendors in this field, and the products they represent are generally functional and reliable.

A Question Of Distribution
The CTI market has been mirroring the traditional computer market for some time now, and analogies are being drawn between the mainframes and minis of the past and today's PBXs. Just as mainframes lost ground to client/server networks, PC-based PBXs are becoming a real alternative to today's PBXs. If this analogy is valid, then we need to ask ourselves what will the distribution channel of the future look like? (For a general treatment of this theme, see the sidebar entitled Growing Pains.)

There was a time when a network VAR would come to your office to install a server and NIC cards and charge you a large sum of money. Now it is common to call your favorite mail-order PC vendor and buy a server (either you or they can configure it). When it arrives by mail, you plug it into your network and it works simply and easily.

This begs the obvious question - "When will I buy my PC-based PBX through the mail?" The answer is ... today! In fact, Pacific Telephony Design is already doing a brisk business selling PC PBXs. They seem to be the only company that is dedicated to the direct marketing channel of the PC PBX market. They provide technical support over the phone, and claim to have had very few returns. The fact that they even accept returns is amazing. I would strongly recommend calling them before making any PBX purchasing decision. They are on to a great thing!

A Question Of Reliability
The computer market thrives on open standards. Truly plug-and-play open standards. Any card you buy works in any PC that you buy. The telephony world of course thrives on reliability. We expect it and we demand it. In fact, a statistic I recently heard was that an average PBX is down for a total of six seconds a year. Generally speaking, this level of reliability would be nothing short of a miracle in the general PC market. UNIX and Microsoft NT Server are two highly stable and robust operating systems that are being used more and more in CTI applications. Our UNIX servers average a down time of about 10 minutes each year. In order to develop CTI products that rival the dependability of a PBX, you need to use an industrial computer as your underlying hardware. The many telecommunications companies and developers reading CTI ™ are aware of this, and every central office is using racks filled with industrial computers that have hot-swappable power supplies and hard disks to control their IVR, ASR, or other applications. Industrial Computer Source, one of the many players in this market, tells me that their products are implemented in many different CTI applications. One developer has built an emergency notification service with their products that is activated by a call from a user with a special password. Once the system receives the call, it calls 600 phone lines and plays a message. The product is used in the case of a nuclear power plant disaster. Other less dramatic, but nevertheless important, applications include screen pops in call centers, pager notification services, voice mail, and fax mail. If there is a recurring fear among people I come into contact with daily, it is the fear of putting their PBX on a PC. They just don't trust PCs as much as PBXs. Using an industrial computer for a PC PBX application allows it to approach the reliability of ordinary

Growing Pains
Regardless of all the wonderful opportunities available in the CTI market today, the industry still faces some growing pains. Perhaps the single greatest challenge facing this industry is to create an effective distribution channel. State-of-the-art CTI products cannot be installed with a single CD ROM and a double-click on setup.exe. There are telephony integration issues that must be dealt with. The fact is that traditional PBX vendors have a channel of distributors known as Interconnects, who are typically wonderful at running cable and installing PBXs and ACDs quickly. Their technical experience is fine for the limited computer encounters they have. What about computer and networking VARs? Members of this camp are always looking for new opportunities. Every computer VAR magazine has been writing articles on CTI and why VARs need to run, not walk, to CTI. However, few traditional VARs are knowledgeable about telephony. The natural question becomes, "Who is more qualified to sell CTI solutions?" Unfortunately, there is no clear answer. There is a steep learning curve for both camps. CTI products work and work well. The challenge is getting the products in the hands of the distributor that can offer a solution that integrates with the customer's particular situation.

The State Of CTI ™
A thorough knowledge of the products, vendors, and technologies is a must for anyone involved in purchasing CTI. Product cycles are measured in weeks, and we are all members of the "new-acronym- of-the-day" club. We trust computer magazines to help us make decisions by providing objective, in-depth reviews. This industry is no exception. With the computer and telephony markets integrating to become CTI, purchasers of this technology need to have a single information source they can rely on.

CTI Testing - Raising The Bar
The response to our magazine has been much better than we could have anticipated. Readers refer to the magazine before buying products, and manufacturers are overloading our office with new equipment for testing. Frankly, we're running out of room! To that end, we have completed construction of a state-of-the-art CTI ™ testing facility. We now have five full-time computer engineers who participate in product testing. We have spared no expense to give you the best product reviews available. Hammer Technologies will endorse the new CTI ™ Lab by providing a Hammer IT, which will provide a consistent test-bed for evaluation and testing of CTI systems and applications. The Hammer provides a complete solution for load, feature, regression, and in-service testing of integrated telecommunications systems and services. We will use this tool, and others, to perform analyses of the CTI products that our readers may consider purchasing.

If you read this magazine, you are involved in purchasing products. Our goal is to present you with information that will help you to avoid purchasing pitfalls. Consider CTI ™ your partner in the buying process. Read every page before you call that next vendor to place an order.

New Feature
As you read through this issue, you will notice the results of our first-ever product awards. Congratulations to this month's award winners! Our editorial staff has used the most stringent standards to pick products that are category leaders or that define a new category altogether. The feedback to the announcement of our Awards program has been overwhelming, with product literature and requests for reviews literally flooding our office. Every month we'll feature a new list of the industry's most deserving products and vendors. Send me an e-mail at rtehrani@tmcnet.com, and let me know what you think.

Stepping Up Production
This is our last bimonthly issue. We are proud to announce that we are stepping up to a monthly production schedule to bring you cutting-edge technology, product announcements, and industry news in the telephony and computer industries. We will continue our pledge to make every page of our publication as educational and objective as possible. We want to be your resource for any product purchases in this market.

Sincerely,
Rich Tehrani (rtehrani@tmcnet.com)
Publisher, CTI magazine