It'll take an irresistible new application to make computer-telephony integration happen everywhere. Will one of these apps do it?
John P. Mello Jr.
We'll never look at telephones the same way again. New and innovative systems are tying the easy voice connections of the phone system to the data transfer and manipulation power of computer networks. The combination is extraordinarily seductive.
Over the next five years, we'll see our phones and computers transformed from separate boxes into a seamless entity that will integrate data and voice. Before this can happen, users have to want the change. What's likely to sell them on the idea is an application that captures the imagination and provides immediate productivity rewards--in other words, a killer app.
"The killer app re
volves around new ways of doing telephony through intelligent computing," explains Ron Charnock, vice chairman of the Multimedia Telecommunications Association (Washington, D.C.). "It's thinking of telephony as a computing resource and less of a telecommunications resource."
A phone call will become a digital entity that can interact with other digital entities on our desktops and networks. It will carry contact information about its originator and trigger the assembly of data from computer files. It will become data itself and give our organizations crucial information about their operations.
No More Baffling Buttons
Current phone systems are a pain for most users, whose skill with advanced telephony features drops off drastically when they need to use more than the 12 buttons on the standard phone keypad. For those folks, the killer app will turn those incomprehensible extra phone buttons and multikey operations into friendly screen icons. "Businesses are spending anyw
here from $100 to $1000 for these fancy business phone sets, and people don't use them," says David Goodtree, a senior analyst with Forrester Research (Cambridge, MA). "The killer app will replace those sets with $30 software that people will use."
Killer apps will integrate many diverse forms of messaging. Electronic mail will convert to voice mail, and voice mail to text. The system will read received faxes over the phone, and pager messages will become voice mail. "The killer app is any type of application that unifies your current business solutions with the telephony environment," notes Michael Durant, a senior product manager with Novell.
Does telephony's killer app exist now, or is it waiting to be invented? A number of new, powerful, and intriguing applications are already out there, and it's too early for the marketplace to render a verdict. Let's look at some of the contenders.
Phone, Take Notes
The killer network app may very well be PhoneNotes, telepho
ny groupware from Lotus Development that sits on top of Notes. PhoneNotes supports applications that enable users to tap into a Notes database through a Touch-Tone phone. One such application, Mobile Mail, lets a user access, create, forward, or edit Notes documents and play documents over the phone through text-to-speech technology.
"One of the attractive features of Notes is the increase in productivity it gives you through greater mobility," explains Peter Klante, Lotus's director of marketing for Notes companion products. "This is a logical extension to that. It turns the most ubiquitous client in the world -- the telephone -- into a Notes client."
Data for Dialing
Some observers believe the guts of a killer app lie in the exchange of simple data. Versit, a joint development initiative by Apple, IBM, AT&T, and Siemens to develop CTI standards (see the sidebar "Strategic Industry Alliances" in the article "Standard Issue"), has laid the groundwork. One of those standa
rds establishes a protocol for the exchange of electronic business cards. "This is really, really important and potentially a killer app," says Jerry Michalski, managing editor for the newsletter
Release 1.0
. "If every time people touch electronically, they can swap their latest contact information, they can suddenly communicate much more efficiently."
It will also eliminate what Michalski calls mode-switching friction -- what you encounter when you try to mix media such as voice mail and E-mail with contacts outside your organization. Once these electronic calling cards become widespread, they can be a bridge between the desktop and the handset. When you check your voice mail, the calling card information is sent to your PC, and a screen pop displays the information. To return the call, just click on the phone number. You'd rather send E-mail? Click on the person's E-mail address. Fax? Web home page? Just click away. Mode-switching friction is reduced to zero. "The calling card protocol is so
low-end and so simple you can do anything with it," Michalski contends.
It's Voice -- No, It's Data
For this electronic calling-card idea to fly, it has to become easier to send data over ordinary phone lines. One promising development is a modem-based technology called VoiceView from Radish Communications Systems. VoiceView lets a user switch between voice and data transmission on an analog phone line, without losing his connection, as long as there's a VoiceView-enabled modem at both ends of the line.
Exchanging voice and data on one line isn't a new idea. Two years ago, MultiTech (Mounds View, MN) introduced a hardware/software product that allowed users to send voice and data simultaneously. But the MultiTech product was pricey, and the parallel approach caused some degradation of the voice portion of the call, so it didn't win wide acceptance. In contrast, VoiceView is inexpensive, doesn't degrade voice, and is being bundled with a number of modems.
Companie
s that have hopped on the Radish vegetable cart include Boca Research (Boca Raton, FL), U.S. Robotics (Skokie, IL), Hayes Microcomputer Products (Atlanta, GA), Diamond Technologies (Anaheim, CA), and Zoom Telephonics (Boston, MA). In addition, Microsoft includes driver support for VoiceView in Windows 95. Considering its support in Windows and the number of modem makers adopting Aurora's technology, industry pundits expect VoiceView to make a big splash in the market. Some analysts project that as many as 10 million modems will incorporate VoiceView by 1998.
Launch My Apps
Another way to enhance the network pipe is through off-the-shelf middleware, such as
FastCall from Aurora Systems
. FastCall, which works with TAPI (telephony API) and TSAPI (telephony services API), endows almost any Windows application with telephony services, such as identification of incoming calls, creation of "screen pops" from customer records, and simulation of a phone's button fu
nctions on a computer display.
FastCall uses the identification of incoming calls to trigger functions selectively within Windows applications. For example, a call from a certain contact can be linked to a record in Lotus Organizer so when that contact calls, FastCall launches Organizer and pops the contact's record on the screen. Or the program can be trained to bring up a spreadsheet program or a personal finance manager when a bill collector calls. Or you can set it up to launch Tetris whenever a certain long-winded acquaintance calls.
FastCall has killer app potential because it works across a broad array of switching equipment, APIs, and applications, and it's transparent to the user. According to Paul Gasparro, CEO and cofounder of Aurora, FastCall is becoming the standard for CTI middleware. "If you go to a major switch company, they'll supply you with TAPI or TSAPI and FastCall," Gasparro says. "The reason it's being adopted as a standard is because it takes all the pain out of computer
telephony integration. Before FastCall, it would normally take six months to get CTI working. With FastCall, it takes less than four hours."
And the Winner Is . . .
Any of these apps might turn out to be the one that makes the difference. Wildfire is certainly the most glamorous, but its future isn't guaranteed (see the sidebar "Wildfire: One Wild and Not-So-Crazy Helper"). PhoneNotes has a lot going for it, including widespread corporate acceptance of its parent product, Notes, and the marketing impetus likely to result from IBM's takeover of Lotus. Either one could dramatically change our daily work habits. VoiceView is a less drastic step that is likely to open new doors for integrating data into our phone habits.
Or maybe the killer app will come from somewhere else. Novell's NetWare Telephony Services offers an attractive model for unified messaging, but its $15,000 price could keep it out of many organizations.
Whenever the killer telephony app arrives, how
ever, one thing is certain: It will pay close attention to the human side of the technology equation.
"This is about social change, not just technology change," observes Michalski of
Release 1.0
. "CTI isn't about plugging a computer into a telephone. CTI is about making life easier for people who want to communicate."
Product Information
FastCall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $200-$600
Aurora Systems
Acton, MA
(508) 263-4141
fax: (508) 635-9756
NetWare Telephony Services . . . . . $15,000
Novell
Provo, UT
(800) 638-9273
(801) 429-7000
fax: (801) 429-5155
http://www.novell.com
PhoneNotes Application Kit . . . . . $695
Lotus Development Corp.
Cambridge, MA
(800) 343-5414
(617) 577-8500
fax: (617) 693-3512
http://www.lotus.com
Vo
iceView
(bundled with compatible modems)
Radish Communication Systems
Boulder, CO
(800) RADISH8
(303) 443-5789
fax: (303) 443-1659
Wildfire. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $50,000/24 users;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $100,000/50 users
Wildfire Communications
Lexington, MA
(800) WILDFIRE
(617) 674-1500
fax: (617) 674-1501
screen_link (49 Kbytes)
Aurora Systems' FastCall endows Windows applications with telephony services. This screen shows a call-center telephony application. The program uses identification of incoming calls to trigger f
unctions, such as popping up a contact record.
John P. Mello Jr. is a freelance writer living in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. You can reach him on the Internet as
JPMjr61750@aol.com
or on BIX c/o "editors."
Telephony's Killer App?
