November 1997

BY JOE STAPLES

Unified messaging, interactive voice response, screen pops, database access, and call blending — all of these terms have become a part of the overall market deployment of computer-telephony integration (CTI). The Internet is now beginning to focus on product evolution for CTI vendors. Just as LANs created new connections between co-workers in the early 1980s, the Internet brings company components together at lower costs.

VPIM: VOICE PROFILE FOR INTERNET MESSAGING
For several years, voice messaging vendors have deployed networking modules for their systems. AMIS (Audio Messaging Interchange Specification) is an industry standard that was developed to allow voice messaging systems from different vendors to be networked together. The disadvantage of AMIS was that in order to achieve parity between different voice messaging systems, it was necessary to water down the specification to a point where the technology no longer provided the robust, full-featured functionality desired by customers. Essentially, customers had to settle for a tradeoff — give up functionality in order to gain the ability to network with other vendors. This compromise didn’t meet the needs of the market, and vendors scrambled to find an alternative that took advantage of all of the features of their messaging system and would therefore give the vendor a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Search for a New Standard
Given this objective, vendors developed proprietary solutions or enhanced AMIS solutions that made their system function in a networked environment. Once again there was a trade-off: vendors were able to provide robust networking functionality, but that networking was applicable only to the vendors’ specific systems.

A new digital networking technology called VPIM (Voice Profile for Internet Messaging) emerged. This new technology allowed networking not only of voice messages but of fax messages, too. The analog-based AMIS standard did not provide any mechanism for network fax routing, although fax had become an integral part of the unified messaging solution.

VPIM Support
VPIM is currently supported by nearly all major messaging vendors. Applied Voice Technology, Lucent, Nortel, Siemens, Octel, and Centigram have committed to developing VPIMcompliant networking products. Broad support of VPIM enables intra-company as well as inter-company networking because it delivers voice and fax messages to disparate messaging systems, including both customer premise equipment (CPE) and service bureau environments.

VPIM uses the Internet as the backbone for transmitting voice and fax messages. This has some strong benefits in the area of cost savings. By using the Internet for routing this networked traffic, separate and dedicated digital lines between systems do not need to be purchased, installed, or managed. The Internet provides the pipe and VPIM defines the communications structure for the networked messages. Based on SMTP/MIME (Simple Message Transfer Protocol/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) Internet protocols, much of the infrastructure definition for VPIM was completed before the Electronic Messaging Association (EMA) formed its working group to construct the various components of VPIM.

INTERNET AND INTERACTIVE VOICE RESPONSE
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems traditionally access a wide variety of database information and utilize voice transmission to relay that information to a caller over the telephone.

Web-enabled IVR
IVR systems that are Webenabled offer not only telephone access to a repository of database information, but also provide a Web interface to access that same information (Figure 1). This means the individual seeking the information (the caller, in a traditional IVR situation) can access the information either from a telephone or from a Web browser. The individual’s Web server has a connection to the Webenabled IVR server, which exploits its current links to databases that reside on a minicomputer, mainframe, or network computer. The benefit of such deployment focuses around “terminal of choice” for the customer and decreased administration and development for the vendor. The customer now has a choice about how he wants to access information and can freely move back and forth between those choices. The vendor’s benefit is that the application is written only once and that the database information is maintained in a single location.

WEB-BASED CALL MANAGEMENT
Web-based call management turns a Web hit into an actual sales call. The best deployment examples of this type of technology are those in which Web sites are enabled with a “call me” button. This link is used when a visitor to a company’s Web site wants to initiate a live conversation with someone about the information displayed on the Web site, or order a product. When the Web surfer clicks the call me button, he initiates an Internet phone conversation with an agent in the call center or someone at the site’s company by transmitting voice over the Internet between soundenabled PCs. Alternatively, the call me button can signal an agent to call the customer via a gateway product if the customer has only one line for his phone and Internet service. The company representative tracks the customer’s Web access, noting which Web pages he selected, and utilizes that information to respond to the customer’s questions. The agent can also “push” targeted Web pages to the caller while conversing with him.

FAX TRANSMISSION OVER THE INTERNET
The ubiquity of fax technology is unquestioned — it is extremely rare today that a business lacks the ability to send and receive faxes. The fax industry continues to evolve, migrating from stand-alone fax machines to more flexible fax servers.

Fax transmission is typically routed over the public telephone network, with all the long-distance charges and tariffs associated with a voice call. Indeed, a large portion of the revenue derived by telephone carriers comes from fax traffic over their networks. Routing fax traffic over the Internet is one of the most clearcut intersections between the computertelephony industry and the Internet. The primary benefit to fax transmission over the Internet is reduced cost.

Fax traffic can be routed over the Internet using a number of methods, including integration with third-party digital networks, using additional hardware to perform routing of the fax transmission over the Internet, or converting fax into email and then using standard e-mail transmission methods to move the data.

In any of the preceding scenarios, utilizing the Internet for fax transmission is a technology that will continue to be a hot growth area for fax solutions. The fact that fax does not have the same requirements for realtime transmission that voice does, and given that the equipment requirements for implementing an Internet-enabled fax transmission system are not required to touch every desktop, means this technology will likely provide noticeable customer benefits in the near future.

UNIFIED MESSAGING OVER THE INTERNET
Traditionally, desktop messaging solutions that support voice messages have consisted of a Windowsbased application that provides network access to voice messages stored on a voice mail server. Some products allow users to use their phone or the multimedia capabilities of their PCs to play and record voice messages.

When messages are played via the phone, the desktop messaging program instructs the telephony server to play the voice file. The server then plays the appropriate file through the PBX to the phone sitting on the user’s desk. The only LAN traffic consists of the small data packet sent from the client to the server requesting playback of the voice file.

When messages are played via the PC sound device, the desktop messaging program instructs the telephone server to play the voice file. The server then copies the voice file across the LAN to the client so that the client application can play the voice file over the PC sound device. The Internet can play a part in this scenario by extending the reach of the network. The desktop messaging user does not need to be physically located on the LAN, he can be connected via the Internet (Figure 2).

Drawbacks
Along with the benefits of using the Internet for desktop messaging come new challenges, including Internet bandwidth issues and off-premise call costs. An Internet-connected desktop messaging station can use either the telephone or a PC’s multimedia capabilities to play and record voice messages. Using the phone requires two connections: one for the Internet link and one for the phone. In addition, the phone connection could be a long-distance call if a voice gateway is not available.

Products that use a voice gateway resolve the bandwidth issue. A voice gateway streams audio in packets over the Internet so that voice can begin playing as soon as the first stream arrives, rather than waiting until the entire file arrives. The gateway is typically located on the network.

TOMORROW’S INTERNET TELEPHONY
Delivering voice over the Internet is a technology that has received substantial attention during the past 12 months. As a definition, the market typically refers to Internet telephony as the use of the Internet for the transmission of live voice traffic.

Probe Research estimates that 34 percent of voice conversations will take place over packet networks by the year 2005. Several vendors are currently deploying products in an attempt to capture a portion of this potentially huge market. Internet telephony, however, is the least-defined and most hurdlebound technology of all the intersections between CTI and the Internet. The problems include transmission quality, lack of standards implementation, and equipment requirements at the desktop.

However, with companies such as Microsoft and Netscape Communications fueling the demand for this technology, these issues are likely to be resolved in the next three to five years. Joe Staples is the senior vice president of Marketing for Applied Voice Technology, a supplier of open systems-based advanced CTI software products. For more information, visit the comany’s Web site at www.appliedvoice.com.