Artisoft Inc has launched the first of its promised set of computer telephony products for personal computers, the InfoFast fax-on-demand and audiotext system. Artisoft is working in conjunction with Dialogic Corp and using Dialogic’s ProLine voice processing and CPi/100 fax processing hardware to offload the processing from the central processing unit. Its Visual Voice telephony software toolkit is the heart of the new system (CI No 2,983). Artisoft’s eventual plan is to produce what it hopes will be a complete PBX system within a personal computer. Computer telephony is one prong of the company’s future three prong strategy – the others being its continued peer to peer local area networking business with its established LANtastic product line, and the newer area of internet and intranet products (CI 3,019). The latter include the iShare internet access product, which allows small businesses to share modems, networks and internet connections. Ishare could make ISDN affordable to small businesses for the first time by enabling five users to connect up at the same time, says Artisoft. Its other products in this area include Extramail, an electronic mail server that uses Eudora Mail as its client, and FirstWeb, a new Web site hosting service, including authoring tools and templates, which the company has put together in collaboration with America Online Inc. Artisoft says it hasn’t given up on LANtastic, but version 7.0, released last June (CI No 2,933), hasn’t taken off as quickly as the company hoped, contributing to the $18.3m losses it sustained last year, and the $2.2m losses of the first quarter of fiscal 1997. The situation is unlikely to improve with Microsoft Corp integrating file and print services into its operating systems, despite Artisoft’s efforts to broaden the functionality of LANtastic. The Tuscan, Arizona-based company hopes that its new product lines, aimed at the same small business customers it has always concentrated on, s old through its established channel of 2,000 resellers, will set it back on its feet.
