The Marriage of Computers & Telephones

Most businesses today are feeling tremendous pressure to reduce expenses and increase productivity using fewer employees. Although the transition from mainframe power to faster desktop computers, better desktop tools, and higher-performance LANs and servers has increased productivity, the improvements are still not enough for some companies. Those companies needing to do even more with less might be able to take advantage of computer telephony (CT) technology. CT technology merges two disparate fields--computers and telephones--to provide communications solutions that improve not only corporate efficiency but also customer service.

Even if you have never heard of CT before, you can put its innovation to good use in your organization once you understand the benefits of its use. But first, you need to know the trends shaping the future of CT.

Trends Driving Innovations
Although CT systems were first primarily used for voice mail and dial-up games (telephone horoscopes being among them), companies are now using them for more sophisticated applications. Several key trends are driving the creative forces behind CT product development.

One important trend is the paradigm shift in how businesses think of and treat voice, fax, and other media. In the past, businesses associated voice messages with voice phone calls. Now, with a variety of transmission technologies available, businesses treat message media just like any other data stream. This simple shift in perception enables companies to do much more with existing resources. For example, they are now sending voice, fax, and video from one corporate location to another in realtime over the Internet or via Frame Relay or ATM virtual private networks. Internal corporate ATM backbones can serve double duty by moving both LAN data and voice, fax, and video transmissions, thereby potentially eliminating the need for separate telephone wiring.

The Internet offers great savings when compared with Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN)-routed connections. You can save by using fax gateways, which let you send faxes between locations with virtually no transport costs, and voice gateways, which let you make free phone calls. You can even hold videoconferences across the Internet at low cost. All you need are the tools to make it happen.

Another influential trend is the business environment. Competition is driving corporations to provide an increased level of customer service while reducing corporate costs. This is an area in which CT shines. Many CT solutions, such as interactive voice response (IVR) systems and call center technology, simultaneously satisfy both needs.

Trends in the computer industry are also influencing CT product development. For example, Windows NT will likely displace Novell NetWare in yearly network server sales by the year 2000, so CT vendors are making major-league bets on NT's future. In fact, NT has helped ignite the CT explosion. Using NT as the core platform, standards-based CT servers are steadily gaining momentum as key organizational communications tools.

The push toward open, expandable solutions is another computer industry trend affecting CT. Proprietary, closed, limited-function solutions are no longer accepTable. Instead, open CT server platforms and products that easily expand to support multiple media message types and automation functions are becoming the norm.

The shift in the media-transport perception, the current business environment, and computer industry trends are already shaping the CT products being designed. In addition to unified messaging systems, major innovations are happening with fax servers, IVR systems, Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) software, PBX-enabled CT servers, and IP telephony products.

Save Time with Unified Messaging Systems
Nonrealtime communication is a critical activity that demands a great deal of time from people's busy schedules. It's not uncommon to spend at least a quarter of a day sorting through and responding to mail. As a result, companies are constantly looking for ways to make communication more efficient. Saving the average employee just 15 minutes a day can result in noticeable improvements in productivity.

Unified messaging systems based on NT can help employees save time. These systems provide universal mailboxes that support voicemail, fax, and email; they will soon support video as well. (For detailed coverage of unified and integrated messaging, see Chris Bajorek, "Unified Messaging," May 1997.) With the advent of NT and the popularity of Microsoft Exchange Server and Outlook, unified messaging is emerging as a strong growth segment in CT. (To see how one company used unified messaging with NT, see " Unified Messaging Success: Paralon Technologies .")

With unified messaging, you can enjoy universal access to your messages at the office, on the road, and at home. Using Outlook's GUI, you can scan your inbox messages and read only the most important ones, quickly filing the others away for later review. Using a telephone user interface (TUI--an interface that lets you use a touch-tone phone to control a CT application), you can listen to your email and even many of your fax messages from any telephone.

A single user directory streamlines systems administration tasks. It cuts in half the time spent configuring, supporting, and maintaining separate voice, fax, and email directories.

In addition, the unified messaging system lets you choose the medium you want to use to respond to any message. Herein lies an important key to the promised productivity enhancements. Responding with a voice message might take you only a few minutes, whereas a typed reply could take 15 minutes or more.

Although this technology's tangible benefits are impressive, it has an intangible benefit as well: A messaging awareness mindset develops when unified messaging enters your daily life. You handle messages more quickly and intuitively; you are more in control.

Several new developments are on the horizon for unified messaging. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) will slowly become an alternative to TUI. Continuing advances in ASR technology with gradual reductions in per-line pricing will probably lower the price of ASR add-ons.

Unified messaging systems will most likely be more reliable in the future. As unified messaging systems assume greater responsibilities in handling all message media and related tasks, messaging servers will attain mission-critical status. Passive-backplane platforms with many slots, enhanced cooling, hot-swappable power supplies, and RAID setups will be the norm rather than the exception.

Using video as a communications tool will also become the norm rather than the exception. As videoconferencing and video servers make their way into businesses, the demand will grow for supporting video as another message type. Unified messaging vendors, however, will still need to contend with video's 2MB-per-minute storage requirements.

Although vendors will have limitations when using video, the sky's the limit when it comes to making other enhancements. For example, more vendors will likely release true, single-store, unified messaging products, most of which will be based on Exchange Server. In addition, a growing number of vendors will probably offer Web-browser front ends, allowing your unified messaging GUI to run on any browser-enabled workstation, anywhere in the world. These front ends will use the Internet to tie disparate messaging systems together via the Voice Profile for Internet Mail standard. (For more information on this standard and other CT terms, see "Computer Telephony Terms and Technologies," page 118.)

Fax as a Core Technology
Although fax is a mature communications technology, it remains a ubiquitous standard for moving documents and information. It is also a strategically important messaging medium that corporations are integrating into their computing environments.

Fax servers let a company use a corporate LAN and standard desktop interface to centralize the faxing hardware and phone lines. Although the fax server started as a standalone application, it is a communications anchor when integrated with messaging, transaction processing, and workflow applications, as Figure 1 shows.