Consider, for just a moment, the historical anomaly of telecom. Despite the conventional wisdom about the rise of the microprocessor and the computer revolution, the fact is that the national telephone network built incrementally by AT&T over the course of decades was a feat of computational and networking engineering unmatched in the 20th century.
And yet, when microprocessors begat PCs and PCs begat client/server networks, the companies that made the phone switches for average businesses remained curiously unmoved. Notwithstanding the fact that the business phone system is one complex piece of computational hardware, there was a great deal of resistance to making the phone act more like a computer.
The computer, though, was easy enough to make act like a phone. The computer industry was better at implementing the things that make disparate technologies talk to each other — important things like vendor-independent standards.
Computer telephony has its origins in the fact that if you wanted to add on to a typical office PBX, you had to buy the add-on from the original vendor, or from a third-party company that wrote to the proprietary spec promulgated by that PBX vendor.
Good applications were hard to find because for a software company writing these add-ons, the cost of developing for multiple switch vendors was prohibitively high. If you wanted a reporting system to complement your switch, you had only a few options: buy from the vendor or the vendor’s approved partner, or build it yourself. None of the options were particularly attractive.
Computer telephony was an attempt by the more perceptive members of both the PBX and computer industries to come to grips with the notion that they were more alike than different. Switches were really high-performance communications servers, after all. If the specs could be opened up, if standards could be developed, both sides would benefit from the flood of applications that would be developed.
Today’s switches come with CTI hooks built in, and a suite of applications from the vendor and its partners that take advantage of the connections.
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