Revolutionary Times for Business Telephone Systems

by Ed Mass

“Telephone System” — what an archaic concept. Today’s newest telephone systems are revolutionizing the very concept of what a telephone system is, what it does, and how it operates. They are being developed on “open systems” and standards instead of the closed, proprietary hardware and software combinations that locked the customer into one manufacturer’s products and servicing.

We have seen that open systems and standards in the desktop computing, LAN (Local Area Networking), and WAN (Wide Area Networking) worlds have created competition. Competition has forced innovation of new services and constantly decreasing prices for increasingly capable hardware and software applications. This same process is now occurring in the telecommunications hardware and software worlds. We have moved from an evolutionary process of “baby steps” in making any real changes in telephone system technologies to revolutionary changes in the basic system architecture. This article explains these revolutionary changes.
Revolution Defined

The “revolution” has been forced by the historical precedence set by the computing world. Desktop computers replaced main frames. Historically, a “Network Operating System” (NOS), such as Novell’s NetWare and Microsoft’s Windows NT, allowed individual computers to be connected together to create entirely new ways of working. The network operating systems have, of course, tremendously advanced since the early versions.

In the world of telephone systems, the new “Telephony Operating System (TOS)” is software that operates under a computer operating system software, such as some version of Unix or Microsoft Windows. This is a revolutionary shift from the proprietary software and hardware combination that locked a business into a single source for both. We also have “open source” telephony operating system software that will run on “standards based” hardware such as SIP (Session Initiation Protocol). Of course, there are many issues involved in going this route. That discussion entails a much more detailed article than this overview.

In addition, IP Telephony and VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) are mature technologies and are taking the bulk of new research and development efforts by the telephone system manufacturers. IP Telephony has many advantages over the traditional telephone systems (known as TDM or Time Division Multiplexed) but as with any technology there are specific concerns that need to be addressed for proper implementation. Again, that entails a longer article. (See the definitions of “IP Telephony” and “VOIP” in the “Glossary of Telecommunications Terms.”) The point is that the telephone system technologies have tremendously advanced in a direction to give greater benefit, lower cost of ownership and maintenance, and increased functionality for organizations of all sizes.

The telephony operating system (TOS) software resides on its own computer server hardware that is designed to be “fault tolerant” and is called the “telephony server.” The fault tolerant hardware design includes duplicate components such as power supplies and hard disks. Data is duplicated on the multiple hard disks so that if one fails another automatically takes over. Redundancy can also be achieved by distributing TOS servers throughout a campus or network of connected sites. In this manner, the hardware can maintain the 99.999% reliability that we all expect from telephone systems. The other key to reliability is, of course, the quality of the software. Therefore, this same level of reliability is being designed into the TOS software.

The new telephony operating system software brings personal and customized voice, data, and video communications to the individual worker just as the desktop computer did for computing. The access to the full functionality of the telephony server is based on using one’s desktop computer. A “well designed” desktop GUI (Graphical User Interface) makes it simple to access all the functionality built into the telephony operating system software. (Although most companies use Microsoft Windows, I will use the more generic term of “GUI” since other desktop operating systems such as Linux and other forms of Unix are becoming more popular.) It would never be possible to access all the new functionality of the system with the cumbersome “interface” of the telephone. The words “well designed” are emphasized because many of the GUI interfaces being developed are poorly designed. In evaluating these products it is very important to carefully evaluate and test the desktop GUI interface to use the features of the system.

The “revolution” is also occurring in the pricing of the new telephony operating systems. These systems are being developed with new capabilities that never before existed. Even with the increased functionality, much lower prices are available for the new systems compared to prices for the more limited functionality in traditional systems. Therefore, enhanced capabilities that once were available only to companies that could pay high dollars for them are now available to companies of all sizes.

Here’s what you can get right now in IP Phone systems:
PBX, also known as the “telephone switch.” But now it not only switches voice calls but it also switches and/or integrates web voice calls, web chat, faxes, and e-mail messages. One can’t refer to all of these as “calls” so we must now use terms such as “contact points” or “mixed media events.” This is revolutionary to have one telephony operating system software product that can switch or integrate any type of “event.”
Automated Attendant. In addition to the company Automated Attendant, you also have Personal Automated Attendant. Personal Automated Attendant allows each person to have their own announcements and procedures for handling callers.
Voice Mail. But now you can access voice mail in many ways — through the telephone, on your desktop computer, and with a web browser over the Internet.
“Drag and Drop” Application Generator that allows total system customization never before possible. This allows programming the system for virtually anything you want it to do. Icons on the computer screen represent different parts of a call, e.g. answering the main telephone line, playing a message to the caller, “reading” the digits a caller presses on the telephone, using text-to-speech to repeat the digits for verification, and using speech recognition to allow the caller to say the numbers instead of pressing them on the phone keypad. You then drag the icons onto a blank “working” area of the monitor. You simply draw lines from the output of one icon to the input of another icon to create the call flow. Finally, you fill in some parameters for each icon. Then the software actually creates the programming code to make your design work and it’s done. The TOS software may never become obsolete. Sure, it will be upgraded but it may never have to be replaced to start over again as many companies have done many times with their telephone systems.
GUI Desktop Interface and a Web Browser Interface to easily use the capabilities of your phone system. Even today most users don’t use what the current telephone systems offer. The telephone is a frustrating interface that forces the use of arcane codes to use many system functions. Even with pre-programmed buttons on the phone, remembering to press multiple buttons in the proper sequence doesn’t compare to “drag and drop” simplicity with a well designed GUI interface.
Know Who is Calling and Respond Before You Answer the Phone. With Caller ID Name and Number your GUI interface to the telephony software will show you who is calling. This can even happen while you’re already on the phone. You decide how you want to handle the call. You can send it to voice mail. You can play a message that says “I am on the phone but your call is important. Please hold and I’ll be with you momentarily.” You can transfer it to another person. Or you can design the system to allow you to do whatever you can dream up. And you do all of this with “drag and drop” simplicity.
Unified Messaging for receiving e-mail, voice mail, and fax mail to a single “mail box.” All messages are then retrievable from each individual’s computer or from anywhere in the world by telephone or network access, e.g. the Internet. This computer-telephony feature will usually require integration between the computer network’s e-mail and fax server and the telephony server. You can even use a Web browser to access all your unified messages from anywhere in the world.
“Screen Pop” to show the caller’s database record on your computer screen as the phone call is delivered to your telephone. You get all the prior call history with this contact before you answer the phone. This is another computer-telephony integration between the telephony server and your computer database.
Fax Server to distribute incoming faxes directly to individual desktop computers. Also, send outgoing faxes directly from desktop computers where most faxes originate anyway.
Online Telephone Directory that immediately shows every new person and every change in the system as it happens. Never again will a company need a printed directory that is outdated as soon as it is printed and distributed.
Workgroup Status that shows the status of everyone in the company or everyone in whatever and however many work groups you want to create on your own desktop.
ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) that distributes a queue of incoming calls to groups of people in “contact centers” (formerly called “call centers”) such as customer service and technical support groups.
Skills Based Routing of ACD Calls that routes the callers to contact center representatives based on their skill levels in handling the topic of the call.
Real Time Supervision of the contact center representatives.
Web Calls allowing a person browsing your web site to call your ACD either by sending their name and phone number for a call back from a representative or by directly talking with your representative over the Internet through their multimedia equipped computer. Web Chat allows a person browsing your web site to initiate a text chat session with a contact center representative.
Queue Integration that allows voice calls, faxes, e-mails, Web calls, and Web chat to all be in the same queue for your ACD. This is revolutionary and possible because of the unified nature of the “all-in-one” TOS software.
IVR (Interactive Voice Response) that connects your callers to your computer databases for delivering personalized information without the need for human intervention. The interface can be the telephone or a web site to the same database with the same programming. One can even have Personal IVR that is customized to individuals within your organization.
Unified Station Administration and Reporting with a friendly GUI interface that delivers far more reporting information than is typically built into traditional telephone systems. A GUI allows the information to be much more easily accessable. Therefore it will be used more frequently to optimize how your organization connects and communicates with internally and externally. Reporting can also occur on the flow of all “events”, i.e. voice calls, faxes, e-mails, Web calls, and Web chats through all parts of the system described above. This is also a revolutionary aspect of new telephony operating system software.
Virtually no telephone system has previously included all these capabilities “right out of the box.” These features would have been added in pieces with links between multiple pieces of hardware that are forced to work together. In so doing, they could probably never achieve the same level of integration as in a TOS software that was designed without any commitments to legacy hardware and software. IP Telephony makes the integration of the voice and data networks much easier than ever.

You should keep the above list and use it when you compare telephony operating system software products. The above list is so comprehensive that many organizations may wonder if they need all these benefits. The bottom line goal of all the capabilities listed above is always one or more of the following:
Saving time
Saving steps, i.e. increasing productivity
Increasing rate of response
Simplifying the entire communications process internally and with the world outside one’s organization

If one of these benefits is not achieved by a new feature, then the feature probably isn’t needed at all. But I believe many companies don’t even realize that they could benefit greatly from many of the above capabilities.

For example, many companies could use the capabilities of an Automatic Call Distributor or Interactive Voice Response system but the costs to set these up have been so high that they haven’t even been considered. These have mainly been affordable only by larger companies. The affordability of these technologies built into the TOS is one of the first examples of dramatic price decreases with increasing capability that was mentioned earlier in this article as one of the benefits of the “revolution.”

Creating the Revolution

Now that you have a sense of the revolution that is occurring, you may wonder why it is occurring at this time. It is occurring for the following reasons:
New companies decided to develop the telephony operating system software starting from a “blank sheet of paper.”
Many years of development in desktop computer, computer networking, and Internet hardware and software technology are usable to create very sophisticated telephony operating system software.
Open systems have evolved for hardware and software. Open systems are ones in which standards exist for the various components of the system. The end user has a choice of purchasing the hardware and software components from a variety of manufacturers and they will all work together. Standards create competition which drives prices down and increases innovation.
Software is separate from hardware.
Standards based, fault tolerant computer hardware has evolved to affordable prices.
Unified functionality has been created from one software package instead of multiple hardware servers running multiple software packages. The systems are also scalable. The fault tolerant telephony servers are being made to connect together with high speed, standards based networks for creating large telephone systems based on the revolutionary TOS software.

As in the computing world, we have now separated the software from the hardware in the world of “telephony servers.” Remember they’re not “telephone systems” anymore. You will buy the software for its capabilities, open standards, and flexibility in customization. And you will buy the fault tolerant hardware based on the best technology and pricing in the same way you currently buy your desktop computers separately from the software that you run on them.

The telephony operating system software products are being developed for Unix based or Windows based platforms. This achieves openness and commonality of platform between the computing and telephony worlds that allows greater integration between functions on these two systems. Unix operating systems have always been more reliable and secure than Windows systems. Unix was originally developed well over 40 years ago by Bell Labs and used to operate the entire public telephone system. That’s been one of the most reliable networks in existence.

The revolutionary telephony operating system software is now available. Only a few products may include all of the features described in this article but most will include a pretty complete subset of the features. Therefore, the customer for revolutionary TOS software will need to take time to compare between the systems and your organization’s needs.

The results of the telephone systems revolution will be exactly the same as those stated in the introduction, specifically more “competition that [will force] innovation of new services and constantly decreasing prices for increasingly capable hardware and software applications.”

Virtually no telephone system has previously included all these capabilities “right out of the box.”
Copyright 1998-2005 Mass Strategic Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners