One of the biggest ironies of the breakneck coalescence of computer and telecommunications technologies now taking place is that computer-communications convergence was seen as the wave of the future a decade ago as AT&T Co plunged into the computer business at the price of spinning out its local phone companies, IBM Corp was building – and finally taking full control of Satellite Business Systems, was investing in and later buying Rolm Corp, Unisys Corp bought Timeplex, STC Plc bought ICL Plc, Northern Telecom Ltd bought a couple of dim computer companies the list goes on. What do we find a decade later? IBM has sold Rolm to Siemens and Satellite Business Systems to MCI Communications Corp, Unisys has sold Timeplex to Ascom Holding AG, STC sold ICL to Fujitsu Ltd and itself to Northern Telecom, Northern Telecom is out of the computer business. Only AT&T has of the giants has remained true to the vision – to the point of spending a healthy fortune on NCR Corp. Yet one way and another, it is now becoming clear that the vision was a valid one: it simply depended on technology, particularly compression technology, to complete the picture, and that took a little longer to arrive than the early protagonists hoped. But the decision of IBM to divest Satellite Business Systems – and then, when it had a crucial 16% stake in MCI in return – made one of the biggest of its many mistakes of the past decade when it meekly let it go altogether.

Ploughs on

In the meantime, AT&T ploughs triumphantly on, the latest evidence being the coming to fruition of its alliance with Novell Inc on computer-integrated telephony (CI No 2,269). AT&T sees the alliance with Novell as the first step towards a future future where the telephone, facsimile machine and computer will coalesce. Users of NetWare can now have the system dial a customer’s phone number and call up the customer’s records at the same time. We saw people with a phone up to their ear, trying to type on their keyboard, when the idea clicked that networking could dial a number and call up records saving time said Bob Young, vice-president of marketing for Novell’s NetWare Systems Group told Reuter. Among the 24 companies planning to do products using the new facilities, Mitel Corp, Kanata, Ontario says it plans to develop PABX-specific drivers for its SX-2000 Light system under the Novell Telephony Services Manufacturers Support Programme, for delivery in mid-1994. Aristacom International Inc of Alameda, California has already conceived SCIL ConferenceManager, an extension of its Switch-Computer Interface Link software family designed to enable users to set up conference calls from any personal computer on a NetWare network.

Dial-in/meet-me

SCIL ConferenceManager turns any ordinary extension on the PABX into an automated conference bridge. It supports both dial-in/meet-me conferencing where the caller is automatically added to an on-going session and dial-out/I’ll-call-you conferencing where the system automatically calls participants at a designated time, the company adds. Reporting capability include resource usage, detailed conferencing history and notations on a conference’s purpose and participants. Fujitsu Ltd’s Fujitsu Business Communication Systems in Anaheim, California says its F9600 Platform PABX will support the telephony services application programmer’s interface with a NetWare Loadable Module from the first quarter of 1994. Fujitsu reckons it is ahead of the game, because it began a co-development project with Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire in 1991, which resulted in the creation of a pilot workgroup application called Fujitsu Computer Automated Telephony that enables Dartmouth Hitchcock users with Macintoshes to place calls from shared and personal directories, receive incoming call information and handle electronic message slips for calls that are forwarded from other stations, using a proprietary telephony server as an interface between Dartmouth’s Ethernet and the F9600 PABX; the basic architecture, based on Fujitsu’s Telecom

munications Computer Services Interface will be adapted to the Novell Telephony Services standard for NetWare. Other PABX manufacturers that have agreed to join the Manufacturers Support Programme and plan to develop software that links their PABXs into Telephony Services for NetWare, are Alcatel NV; Comdial Corp; GEC Plessey Telecommunications Ltd with its iSDX; Interconnect Ltd – the UK manufacturer of the Interconnect 3000, a Digital Hybrid PABX switch, designed to accept an integral Ethernet interface to connect with computer networks; SDX Business Systems Ltd, another UK firm, makes business telephone systems and holds a 35% share of the US automated call distribution market and has just launched a range of computer-telephone integrated systems as well, of course, as AT&T with its Definity PABXs.

Doctors

Novell says that 24 software companies are writing programs for such diverse applications as telemarketing, caller identification and trend analysis, conference calling and call tracking, and one to step forward was VMX Inc’s Client/Server Software division in San Jose, which said that future product releases of VMXmail will include support for the new facility, with initial product releases to include support for Windows-based power dialler capabilities using the VMXmail visual voice mail interface. Potential uses of the Novell Inc technology include dialling a patient’s phone number and calling up pertinent medical records for the doctor, and even bringing in another doctor in conference. The doctors would not need to have computers made by the same manufacturers, and the partners suggest that this means that users can get more value out of their current equipment before new high-tech replacements come on the scene over the next 10 years. An employee returning to the office could find out about screentop messages, facsimile and voicemail messages via the computer, in effect, through a single medium, and the system could then turn on the telephone for thosee voicemail messages that the user wants to hear. Adding computer-integrated telephony capability should cost no more than $500, the partners say.