Strategic Industry Alliances

VERSIT

An important alliance is Versit, formed by Apple, AT&T, IBM, and Siemens in 1994. It aims to define a comprehensive solution, enabling the development of configuration-independent CTI applications that work in direct-connect or client/server configurations.

Versit will support PDAs (personal digital assistants), personal computers, pay phones, proprietary digital phones, and servers. The planned Versit CTI Encyclopedia will define terminology, configurations, feature sets, call flows, protocols, the Versit TSAPI (Telephony Server API) procedural API, and object classes.

In June, Versit released its first specifications on the World Wide Web (www.versit.com).

ECTF

In April, Dialogic, Digital Equipment, Ericsson Business Networks, Hewlett-Packard, and Northern Telecom formed the ECTF (Enterprise Computer Telephony Forum) to promote an open, competitive market for CTI. ECTF is the first consortium of end users, vendors, systems integrators, and software developers to work toward implementing CTI based on international standards.

ECTF will promote implementations for CTI elements and will also deal with both call-control and media-stream-processing issues. The forum will not select or promote specific CTI technologies (as Versit has), but it will work toward interoperability among standards and technologies.

ECMA/CSTA

The ECMA (European Computer Manufacturers Association) has formulated a standard, called CSTA (Computer-Supported Telephony Applicatons), to enable computers and telephone systems to communicate.

But CSTA is not an API -- it's a communications protocol specifying how to make the connection between a phone switch and a computer. "The problem," according to Dialogic's Carl Strathmeyer, "is that while switch vendors all claim to support the CSTA standard feature set, they all implement them differently." For example, the transfer command might mean one function for one vendor's CTI product but trigger a different response from another vendor's system.