CTI APPLICATIONS - Verbal exchange

The PBX is under attack from PC-based voice switches offering better integration with the Lan. Stephen Hannington reports.

Computer telephone integration (CTI) has always promised a lot, butr integration with the Lan. Stephen Hannington reports. has been disappointing in delivering the goods. The most common criticism is the complexity of installation, since the technology attempts to bridge the gap between two disciplines: telephony and networking, with neither discipline being compatible enough to make the concept work.

To date, the solutions have involved attempts to establish interoperability between a bundle of separate boxes, focusing on a CTI server on the network side and a traditional PBX on the telephony side, this adds to both complexity and expense.

Now a new wave of hardware integration is sweeping the supply side. Servers with embedded voice switches and voice switches with embedded servers are coming onto the market, along with bespoke voice/Lan equipment and voice-switching PCs. The telecoms and networking industries are getting together, producing a wider range of platforms.

IT companies began the attack by trying to prise open the proprietary PBX some years ago. They first succeeded with applications interfaces such as Microsoft's TAPI and Novell's TSAPI. These allowed network applications to interact with the voice switch, transferring some degree of call control to the PC along with software integration.

The ultimate goal was to do away with the PBX and simplify the integration by running applications together under a single operating system such as Windows NT. This move, it was argued, would reduce costs and open up a new market for the IT industry.

Though the initial thrust may have come from the IT side, PBX makers have risen to the integration challenge. The PC/server switch has spurred some firms into making their products more Lan-friendly and evolving them into a multi-purpose Wan gateway capable of handling voice and data.

SDX Business Systems is one such innovator: it is currently field-trialling a version of its Index PBX with an embedded Windows NT server. Two US PBX manufacturers, Harris and Comdial, have done the same. SDX's strategy manager David Spiby believes that neither the PC nor the server will make it as switches because they are simply not optimised for the job.

"There's some limited potential at the smaller end of the market," he said. "But the PC has neither the resilience, performance or the scalability to be a switch."

He added: "I rather think the PC PBX is at a transitory stage. New equipment will evolve from it, but not using the PC as a switch. It's a good development platform, but not a delivery platform."

One dissenter is Paul Smith, commercial director of reseller Northamber, which is the exclusive distributor of MediaPath, a server-based PBX launched last September.

"A PBX is just a PC," he said. "It's just that (PBX makers) don't want it to look like a PC because they'd lose all their value otherwise. I strongly believe that the PBX is dying. The death knell is sounding. All the PBX resellers know it."

MediaPath can serve up to 100 extensions and costs between #300 and #600 per desk. It falls in line with Spiby's view of the role of the PC/server switch aimed at small or branch-office applications.

Changing with the times

Mitel's product strategy manager Rob Turner said: "the PBX is not dead.

It's changing. The telecoms mainframe (PBX) model is out of the 19th century: the IT model is out of the 20th century". He has a vision of convergence in which "voice has equal status with any other application within the computing and network domains".

Market analyst company Schema has made a study of CTI, tracking its development since 1992. Chairman David Brown, whose background is in network architecture, can see both sides of the argument: "There's still a situation in which the IT industry doesn't understand the complexity of voice networking and vice versa."

But he believes this will not last forever. The PC switch is here to stay. Its future lies in medium-sized companies with a Lan, he said, where customer contact or workflow are important. At the top end of the market, where large corporates are likely to have serious money tied up in legacy digital PBXs, PC or server switches could be useful in add-on, standalone call centre applications. And this is exactly where Mediapath is targeted.

"At the moment, the market they can most successfully attack is the 15 to 40-person company," he said. "Then you do run out of steam and probably processing power. But the rate of development of the IT industry is bewildering.

These could be regarded as temporary constraints."

One possible solution to the scalability problem could be networking a series of PC/server switches, interfacing with the Wan via a common gateway. He described an example where a US company had used this approach, though he admitted the idea did not catch on. But it still might.

Rising to the challenge

Further indications of the response of the traditional voice switch makers to the challenge of CTI in general and the PC switch in particular is the fact that German manufacturer Siemens has produced its own PC switch called HiCom Distributed for the home market. The telephony board has a separate power supply so that the telephones remain powered when the PC itself is switched off: an important point which the IT industry typically misses, Brown said.

One company that is getting it right, he believes, is start-up, Network Alchemy, which launched late last year with a range of products that included a combined PBX/ router called CyberGear Gold. Costing #750, it integrates a six-port PBX with an IP router, as well as support for TAPI and MAPI (Mail API) CTI application software. The Wan interface is basic rate ISDN, betraying the origins of company founders John Birbeck and Sean Harding with ISDN router specialist Scorpion Logic.

These are not PC-based, but built on a "bespoke hardware platform", according to marketing director Birbeck. PCs were rejected for a number of reasons, including low reliability. "The up-time of the product wasn't good enough for us and the re-boot time was far, far too long," he said.

Also, the company wanted to concentrate on digital Wan connections, which make greater demands on the processing power than a PC could handle. "PCs just didn't have the guts to do it unless you go for a very, very high level of processing power," Birbeck said. "I don't think PC PBXs can win the long-term race. You'll have to look at bespoke hardware platforms."

Other launch products were Gold's entry-level sidekick, the CyberGear TA basic rate terminal adaptor, and the ArgentOffice range of stackables that supports up to 96 users. Priced between #1,100 and #20,000, the latter also combines the functions of a PBX, a router and an Ethernet hub, supporting basic or primary rate ISDN and leased line connections on the Wan side.

The Wan is also often overlooked by the IT industry in its attempts to replicate and undermine the PBX, Spiby believes. In concentrating on Lan applications as the main driver for CTI uptake, it has missed the point in another critical area that he thinks PCs or servers are not well-suited to.

"It's not just the convergence of telephony and computing at the application level," he said. "It's about the convergence of voice and data at the physical layer as well. One of PBX's strong points is its ability to support a wide variety of Wan links."

To this end, SDX plans to launch a version of its Index digital communications platform later this year. It will have a built-in multiplexer so that it can operate as a multi-purpose gateway connecting voice and data to the outside world via such options as PSTN, ISDN, leased lines or Frame Relay.

Two worlds collide

But can a company from a voice networking background understand the needs of the Lan? Spiby believes so. At the application level, the Index supports the standard interfaces such as TAPI, TSAPI and IBM Callpath. However, this is not enough for Spiby.

"If we only supported standards, I don't believe we would get very far," he said. "Standards are absolutely no good at all for most users," he added.

Most users employ in-house or custom application software that is not CTI standards-compliant, he argued. So SDX has developed object-oriented APIs in mainstream formats such as C++, and OCX that can be exported from the switch.

"They can just drop this little object into their application," he said . "It's meat and drink to end users' IT departments, who can realise a telephony function is accessible. It reduces the entry barrier to CTI."

Brown believes that what users want is to be able to integrate their existing applications with telephony in some way. And that usually means bespoke application software without standard telephony APIs. Thus systems integration at the software level, rather than the hardware level, is where the big challenge lies, and is where suppliers have got it wrong in the past.

"The CTI industry doesn't seem to have done a particularly good job of educating the market," he said. "Despite that, the market is growing."

Schema found, in its most recent survey of more than 500 businesses throughout Europe, that potential users' greatest perceived difficulty is integration, particularly existing applications with a CTI host. Almost one in three foresaw this as the main stumbling block, even though they view the unfamiliarity of the technology itself as less of a handicap than they had done two years earlier.

"Having finally managed to make people aware of the benefits of CTI, the systems integration industry lacks the ability to deliver," Brown reported.

To date, most of the systems integration has been done by smaller players, though large firms such as Andersen and Logica have got in on the act in the last two years or so.

"There's a lot more help available to the systems integrator now. Big developments in middleware have significantly eased the systems integrator's task in the last couple of years. That has been immensely important in the acceptance of CTI," he said. "The acid test is the ability of suppliers to integrate with a range of applications, including custom applications, safely and securely."

Spiby said users don't care what hardware is involved. "They're looking for a solution that is resilient at a good price that integrates easily into their business applications with performance and scalability. I would say that a PC switch struggles to deliver all these points."

But even if the PC or server switch does not ultimately usurp the traditional voice switch, its main achievement will still have been to put the IT cat among the PBX pigeons.

It will break open one of the last bastions of closed, proprietary systems to free up the potential advantages of voice and data integration: at both the physical and the application levels.

"One of the problems with the telecoms industry is that the kit they sell is expensive," Brown said. "PCs are a warning to the PBX makers that they can't keep charging crazy prices forever."

The choice for users interested in CTI is now greater than ever before.

The PC/ server-based voice switch opens it up for smaller firms and standalone applications in bigger companies. But its biggest impact has been in forcing a rethink in the more go-ahead PBX makers, who have responded with a new breed of switch much better suited to the needs of the information age.