Santa Cruz Operation Inc and Dialogic Corp will announce at Voice Europe 96 in London this week that they are developing what they claim to be the first computer-telephony integration system based on open standards. CT-Connect, as it is known, will run under Santa Cruz UnixWare when it is released in the second quarter of next year. There are already HP-UX, Santa Cruz OpenServer and DG-UX Unix clients for CT-Connect, but no Unix server. In fact Parsippany, New Jersey-based Dialogic must be one of the only companies migrating its server product from Windows NT to Unix. Up until now, telephone systems and Unix-based computing networks have had to operate independently, Dialogic says. Both companies are looking to feed off a market which Dataquest expects to be worth up to $8bn by the turn of the century. Santa Cruz estimates that the telephony market accounts for up to 10% of its turnover at present. CT-Connect enables applications to trigger responses such as placing further calls on a line when another application already has a call in progress.
Four versions
It comes as server software running under the operating system, supporting call control and monitoring through links to telephone switches. It works by implementing communication protocols to work with each switch’s computer telephone integration link, map the differing protocols and messages to a common call and manage telephony service requests and status messages between the server and applications. There will be four versions of CT-Connect server. A full configuration will support all the client operating systems, which also include all Windows, as well as Santa Cruz OpenServer, HP-UX, DG-UX, and an unlimited number of clients. A Desktop version will support an unlimited number of clients, but restrict the management to the desktop, where typically each client can manage one or two telephones, rather than managing some telephones directly from the server. A Desktop Lite version will also be available, supporting up to 36 client systems running desktop applications, and an evaluation version will be available free of charge, supporting up to 16 clients. The version for UnixWare will support Microsoft Corp’s Telephony Application Programming Interface, TAPI and Dynamic Data Exchange, DDE standards initially, with support for Novell Inc’s Telephony Services Application Programming Interface, TSAPI, following later. Once the product is ready – there will be a developers’ release out in January – the two companies will jointly market it, mainly through their existing channels and OEM customers. Santa Cruz has been selling OpenServer, and more recently UnixWare into the computer-integrated telephony market for some time, according to Gordon Jago, Santa Cruz’s telecommunications market development manager, but this will be the first time with a product it has helped to develop. Dialogic’s computer-integrated telephony marketing director Carl Strathmeyer said the UnixWare version will be designed to be binary-compatible with Gemini, the merged UnixWare and OpenServer. The full version is likely to cost around $15,000, with the Desktop and Desktop Lite versions costing about $7,500 and $3,000 respectively, according to Strathmeyer.
