What Goes Around Comes Around
Having been involved with the CTI software industry over the last 25 years, I’ve seen a lot of changes for better and worse. Of course starting my career in the mid-80s meant that not only were the shoulder-pads big, the computers and telephone systems were too! My colleagues and I would spend many hours locked away in noisy and cold machine rooms trying to debug real-time X.25 links into telephone switches that were configured using completely incomprehensible languages of their own (OK, that hasn’t changed). We would rarely come out for fresh air except maybe on a Friday lunch time to go to the pub.
Sometimes an account manager would bring round an interested prospect to for a demonstration of our bleeding-edge technology and would never be more excited than when we typed in three or four command lines and as if by magic, the Message Waiting lamp would light up on some dusty old phone! I’m not sure why this got everyone so excited, I suppose because people had been used to phones bursting into life and ringing by of their own accord ever since Alexander Graham Bell’s invention in 1876 (I’ll come back to him in a minute).
In the ’90s, we shut down all the machine rooms and had the pleasure of moving our development onto Windows and UNIX workstations. We had interactive debuggers, platform independent programming languages and even started working on CTI standardization – life was good! I personally couldn’t believe it when someone suggested we should develop a Windows client for our CTI software, but it seemed to take off.
The 21st century started off well. We had the dot-com boom and VoIP solutions were being developed starting with the somewhat cumbersome H.323 but moving swiftly on to the promised land of user-extensible SIP. Circuit switched PBXs were becoming very passé and suddenly traditional CTI was accused of being legacy! We shifted our attention to developing CTI for packet-switched telephony, knocked out Web services and integrated cloud-based CRM solutions, all good stuff.
Then along came Unified Communications and Messaging. Companies wanted to see all their communications technologies working together and realized that their $50K PBX still had life in it yet. Hybrid solutions allowed their existing PBX to work along-side departmental VoIP platforms and the more enlightened telcos made their existing CTI interfaces work with these. The upside being that the customer investment in applications using our CTI-middleware was able to seamlessly move on to these new platforms.
And the funny thing is, the latest must-have CTI technology needed to support presence-based applications is: busy lamp indication! Ironically, Mr. Bell considered the telephone to be too disruptive and refused to have one in his study; if only presence-based solutions had been around he could have set his status to Do-not-disturb and got on with inventing the next big thing!
Like Alexander Graham Bell, Donald Finnie was educated at Edinburgh University and enjoys motorcycling, sailing, tennis and golf. (OK, AGB probably only was interested in golf!) Donald is a product development manager for Syntellect, and is based in the United Kingdom.