Enterprise IT
Is There A CTI Server Looming In Your Future?
For all the discussion about video conferencing and other multimedia applications,the core business media remain voice, data and fax. Yet Computer TelephonyIntegration (CTI), the merger of voice and data on the network, is havingrelatively little impact on the mass market (see "CTI Rides Again,"November 1, page 39). History repeats itself in our business. The originalIBM PC was open enough to provide for multivendor competition. The adoptionof 10BASE-T allowed the LAN market to grow. Now the question for CTI iswhat will open up the telephony infrastructure to an equivalent scale ofmultivendor competition?
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Is it safe to come out yet? I'm writing this column from under a rock during the debut of Windows95. I'm afraid to turn on the TV, lest the guy who normally delivers the weather report for the local news blasts me with yet more sage advice. Regardless, this ultimate consumer event emphasizes yet again that the technology advances from which we in the corporate world will benefit will not come of our own doing, but rather as an offshoot of the race to equip consumers. In a few years, we'll look back and think that the invention of Tang was what made the moonshot possible. Yet, somehow in the commotion, the original consumer electronic device has been ignored.
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