Nothing makes me happier than seeing CTI technology positively effect
the lives of users. Increased productivity, reduced cost, reduced turnover — these
are all benefits of CTI technology. I am always on the lookout for people that can become
more efficient with the use of technology, and to that end, I happened upon several people
eating lunch at a trade show. Their table contained the lone empty seat in the cafeteria.
We got to talking, and lo and behold, they worked for a computer company. One especially
outspoken person was the Midwest regional salesperson for this company.
I introduced myself as the publisher of a number of trade magazines and produced a
sample issue of a magazine. The salesperson mentioned that she had heard of the magazine
and indeed liked the way it looked — but had never read it. Trying to mask my
somewhat hurt feelings, I uneasily queried her as to why. "No time," she said.
No time.
We got to talking about how she makes her sales. Apparently, she’s constantly on
the road, covering her territory and selling computers to corporate accounts. She told me
that a good part of her day consists of calling her office from her car and finding
someone there to read her e-mail and faxes to her. I laughed, all the while thinking to
myself about the old adage that I’m too busy chopping down trees to sharpen my axe.
Who on Earth would want to be responsible for stopping their work and scrambling around
the office for e-mail and faxes, I thought? Worse, who would want to read them aloud on
the phone every few hours?
So I took a risk. If I could get an extroverted salesperson, with strong opinions and
no problems expressing them, excited about CTI technology, there is no telling how many
people she would sell on the benefits of CTI. So I mentioned some sample CTI applications
that I thought would help her. I told her about e-mail readers that could read her
messages to her over the phone, and unified messaging — integrating her fax, e-mail,
and voice mail. Throughout our conversation, I thought she might get up and leave the
table with no notice, since she expressed earlier that she had no time to do anything but
her immediate job. Thankfully, I was mistaken. Her eyes lit up like she had just received
a 10,000-unit order. "Really?" she asked, "I can do that?" Yes, I
replied, as I thought to myself that I had just nabbed a new reader. I told her that her
faxes could even be read to her — though fax is a bit trickier than e-mail. The
kicker was when I told her she could respond with her voice and have an embedded WAV file
sent in the e-mail. As she spends a great deal of time in her car and her customers almost
all communicate electronically, she is a natural CTI user.
CTI: A Natural Productivity Booster
There are few positions in a company that can’t be improved with CTI
technology. Network fax, unified messaging, call control, and call center products are
truly breakthroughs in productivity. From the mailroom to the president’s office,
there is no position that cannot be made more efficient with CTI.
Every company and every country lives and dies by their productivity in relation to
other companies and other nations they compete with. Nations’ economies are linked to
their productivity. PCs and networks were the first wave of productivity boosters.
Computer telephony integration is the second. It’s my wish to see CTI implemented as
widely as possible, so that eventually everyone will know what CTI is and how it benefits
them. CTI magazine writes about leading-edge issues; not only in the computer and
networking fields, but also telecommunications and, of course, the Internet. There are
some great products in this market combining the power of these disparate worlds, giving
us tools that can do so much more with so much less. In today’s rapid-fire world, we
are all under constant pressure to keep up with the constant changes in technology.
HISTORY
Of course, one of the earliest incarnations of truly useful computer
technology was the mainframe. Mainframes changed the business world by allowing
corporations to track huge volumes of data and receive reports with unprecedented speed
and accuracy. Mainframes were very expensive, and working with the mainframe meant that
you sent and received data in batches. Communica-tion was not interactive, as you had to
decide well in advance, what your interaction with the mainframe was to be — an
entire batch at a time.
Early mainframe programmers should all be honored today with a huge shrine in the shape
of a punch card. For those of you unfamiliar with punch
cards, count your blessings. When writing early programs, you would
write a program and transcribe each line onto a series of punch cards created with a
special punch card machine. Data was entered in a similar fashion. Once your cards were
punched, they would be read in batches by a card reader and subsequently passed to the
mainframe for processing.At some later time, your patience would be rewarded when the
mainframe finally gave you a response. The exacting nature of the punch card system meant
that usually, some of your cards needed to be repunched. Error detection and correction
was aided with a huge reference book, which hopefully explained what mistake you made and
possibly how to correct it.
The mainframe interface was rigid — no exceptions allowed. Precious mainframe time
was conserved at the expense of employees whose time was much less valuable. Eventually
punch cards gave way to dumb terminals. From a productivity standpoint, the dumb terminal
was a giant leap forward from the days of the punch card. Still, most interactions with
the computer continued to be done in batches.
As time progressed, processor power per dollar decreased. As computational cost
receded, personnel cost increased. It was soon clear that the mainframe needed to become
more user friendly. Mainframes finally became interactive and computer languages went from
difficult assembly languages to much more programmer-friendly languages like COBOL.
Processing power became even more economical with the advent of the personal computer
and later the IBM standard PC. CPM and DOS were the first PC operating systems and were
interactive but still character-based. By today’s standards, both CPM and DOS were
dinosaurs, which were anything but user-friendly. Soon, these operating systems too were
left behind, as graphical user interfaces (GUI) became popular. The Mac and Windows
highlighted how much more productive workers could be. Every office worker was now able to
produce work such as documents and spreadsheets — work that once took teams of people
to assemble.
BACK TO THE PRESENT
As computers drastically improved our productivity in dealing with data, so
too does CTI drastically improve our productivity in communicating with others. Fax
servers, unified messaging, call control products, and others help us improve our
efficiency dramatically.
CTI is a natural evolution of technology from data centers into communications and call
centers. Help desk agents once had to look up information in databases to help callers
solve their problems. No longer. With the latest generation of Web-enabled help desk
tools, callers can help themselves, saving their time and the call center’s money.
When a call finally becomes necessary, help desk agents have entire customer histories up
on their screen before they answer the customer’s call.
ALL SMILES
Nothing makes me happier than seeing CTI technology positively effect the
lives of users. We at CTI magazine are always on the lookout for ways to make
people’s lives easier and better through the use of products and technology that
allow them to do more with less. Sometimes I feel I have the best job in the whole world,
helping people become more efficient and thus freeing up time for them to pursue countless
other diversions. Success stories are commonplace in this industry. There are so many
products that help us do so much more both more efficiently and effectively, it’s
time for us all to decide which ones are best, and go out and buy these products as soon
as possible. The choices are daunting and you’ll want to keep reading CTI magazine
to keep abreast of what we think about the products we test in TMC Labs. Hopefully, when
you do finish reading this issue, you will put it down just long enough to stop chopping
and have your axe sharpened.
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Feeding
Frenzy!
Recently, there has been a frenzy of merger, acquisition, and alliance activity between
companies in the data communications and telecommunications industries. Take, as an
example, Fore Systems, a company with a breadth of ATM
products working with Sphere Communications who
produce ATM-based PBXs.
Data networking companies that produce hubs, routers, packet switching, and WAN
products are becoming very interested in carrying voice traffic using their equipment. Of
most recent interest is Cabletron's 30 percent equity
investment in NetPhone, a long-time vendor of PC-PBX
products. NetPhone will help Cabletron with its IP telephony strategy. These two examples
foreshadow an even greater number of acquisitions and alliances to take place between
voice and data companies. Networking vendors have decided that voice is the next big
opportunity for them, as evidenced by Cisco Systems'
setting up an Internet telephony division. It makes perfect sense: Cisco has already
shipped over 50,000 voice ports in the last quarter alone!
As you might imagine, traditional voice communications companies are not sitting idly
by as their market share erodes. They realize that in a converged voice/data world, they
need to round out their product offerings and be prepared as voice becomes commonly
transported over packet networks. Lucent's recent acquisition of Yurie Systems gives them access to a wealth of frame
relay, ATM, and DSL products. Nortel's recent
attempt to purchase Bay Networks is another
example of the industry's mindset as regards the "feeding frenzy" taking place
all around us.
We at CTI magazine have long been proponents of the "single pipe to the
desktop" concept. Maintaining separate voice and data lines is complicated,
expensive, and inefficient. Efficiencies gained by multiplexing voice, video, and data
over packet networks are too great to be ignored. As standard programming interfaces
become available to deal with packetized voice, new options will be available to us that
we can't even fathom yet. Lower costs will be the initial spark to propel the Internet
telephony market, while enhanced services and incredible flexibility in dealing with our
voice networks will fuel the second wave of product purchases. Today, there are precious
few developers who understand the arcane world of telephony programming. Internet
telephony will provide the telephony world with standardized application programming
interfaces (APIs). The advent of these standard interfaces will allow millions of
developers to manipulate voice as they do data today.
According to Cisco, these new standards should play well with other standards such as
H.323 and TAPI 3.0. As this happens, look for even more convergence between the data
networking companies and PBX vendors. There are those that doubt the future of Internet
telephony and merged voice and data networks. In light of the many incorrect predictions
I've witnessed, who can blame them? (ISDN, video conferencing, and OS/2 come to mind.)
What I have never seen before is the WAN, LAN, PBX, and computer hardware and software
vendors all aligning their strategies in exactly the same direction. For those of you that
doubt that converged networks are drawing closer, keep your eyes open for the latest
mergers and acquisitions in the CTI market and judge for yourself. n
As computers drastically improved our productivity in dealing with data, so too does
CTI drastically improve our productivity in communicating with others.
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