Ca ll Control for the Rest of Us

New technologies launch an end-run around computer telephony incompatibilities.

Alan Joch

You've heard the computer telephony song before: screen pops for sales and service agents, routing of incoming calls, messages that jump from desktop to cell phone to pager. Right. Given a choice, most frustrated IS managers would rather hear the Barney theme once more than listen to that tune again.

"Computer telephony integration [CTI] hasn't been the golden goose we thought it was going to be," says Michael Carpenter, president of CT Source (Marblehead, MA), a computer telephony systems integrator. "The computer telephony market has been in a mess for yea rs." But integrators and users foresee change this year. Not from new technologies, but from innovative uses of existing technologies. Telephony vendors had designed CTI servers that wor ked with PBXes (and got mired in API incompatibilities and proprietary hardware). But this year, telephony vendors will introduce CTI servers with new ways to wall off or encapsulate telephone switches. The result: reduced CTI budgets.

Xantel takes this approach with a CTI server that bucks the conventional telephony wisdom of the PBX being the first point of contact with a telco's central office. Xantel's Connex server captures communications directly from the central office, then routes voice to the PBX; it routes faxes, e-mail, and other messages to a TCP/IP LAN.

This twist has a big plus: no changing the existing phone system to handle new services. Since routing takes place before the switch, the PBX can be new and sophisticated or old and traditional. This also avoids trying to support Microsoft's Telephony API (TAPI), Novell's Telephony Server API (TSAPI), or a proprietary alternative from a PBX vendor.

Resellers say this can cut installation from weeks to days. At $125 to $250 an hour, this means saving thousands of dollars per project. Connex does have some shortcomings: The version out early this year does not work with Centrex systems and supports only Windows servers and clients. Xantel may address the former problem this year but plans to retain the Windows platform bias.

Interactive Intelligence tackles integration hassles another way: by making the PBX part of a centralized service center. Interaction Server, a Java application, provides the central intelligence for handling voice calls, faxes, e-mail, and Web forms. End users run either Interaction Client or a Java-enabled Web browser to retrieve messages or initiate outgoing communications. Interactive Intelligence is preparing a Java version of Interaction Client for multiplatform c apabilities.

These products don't make CTI plug-and-play, but they could help simplify the merging of data and voice in the enterprise. That may be enough to bring CTI to more than just the richest and most patient companies.

---

Where to Find

Xantel Corp.

Phoenix, AZ 
Phone:    602-437-6400
Internet: 
http://www.xantel.com



Interactive Intelligence

Indianapolis, IN
Phone:    317-872-3000
Internet: 
http://www.inter-intelli.com




Information on products in the 
telephony
 category

HotBYTEs
 - information on products covered or advertised in BYTE

---

CTI Before the PBX

illustration_link (28 Kbytes)

---

Xantel Corp. and Interactive Intelligence in 1998

illustration_link (13 Kbytes)

AT A GLANCE: Instead of relying on PBXes to trigger responses from CTI servers, a new generation of proactive servers intercepts communications from the central office and routes messages to the PBX or the LAN.

WHO SUPPORTS IT: Integrators and IS managers responsible for implementing complex CTI systems; makers of MAPI-compliant mail systems; PBX vendors, including Ericsson, Lucent, Mitel, Nortel, and Siemens.