IBM UK Ltd is making a big push into the UK Computer-Integrated Telephony market. Last week, there was the belated news of a joint development deal with GEC Plessey Telecommunications Ltd designed to get their products working together – solving one of IBM’s biggest obstacles in the UK. In addition, at the end of last month, the company announced an innovative plan to pump-prime the nascent market by giving customers the chance to use of its CallPath system free – giving IBM a cut of the cost savings that the system produces. The scheme is the brainchild of UK Voice Solutions Centre Manager Stuart Firth, and it goes like this.

Large IBM lorry

After a brief consultative period during which IBM and its customer identify potential savings, the computer company installs CallPath and its associated products free of charge. Then for six months, vendor and customer wait to see if saving materialise. If they don’t, then a large IBM lorry comes along and picks up the kit. If, on the other hand savings do materialise, the customer gives IBM a cut of the six-monthly cost saving – in fact the first installment covers 18 months, giving IBM the chance to recoup its consultancy and installation fees. After that however, the company continues to pay the agreed cost-saving cut at six monthly intervals, the deal can be cancelled with a 30-day notice period, and lasts for five years – after which time, IBM will reduce the payments to something in line with a standard maintenance deal. So far, the programme is unique to the UK, not, according to Firth because of any intrinsic peculiarities in the UK market, but simply because he thought it up and chief executive Nick Temple okayed it. Will it expand to the US or the rest of Europe? As long as they pay me for the copyright says Firth, not completely tongue in cheek. The problem with selling the concept of linking computers and telephone systems to get competitive gain is that it falls between three stools, according to Firth. While computers and PABXs fall neatly within the purview of the data processing and telecommunications departments, Computer-Integrated Telephony needs to be sold directly to the manager in customer services. The concept is very difficult to understand… To try and explain it needs quite an understanding of the technology, he says, adding that the profit-share scheme is preferable to getting bogged down in a long conversations with customers over whether Computer-Integrated Telephony really can save money.

IBM likes to think of Armonk as the home of all good marketing ideas, but there are more than a few creative marketing minds in the company’s far-flung international operations, and one such has popped up in the UK with a solution to the problem of persuading users that linking the phone system to a computer really is a good idea. Chris Rose reports.

Firth suggests that his team will be key to the scheme’s success, enabling him to be a solution seller rather than a CallPath seller. I was extremely lucky getting the group together, he says, and this is perhaps one more reason why the approach can’t be directly transported to other countries. Does it work? We were very surprised at the size of the benefit for some of these systems we are talking about a nine-month payback, Firth claims. Three customers have been lined up in the UK, one being ICI Paints. Initially, IBM is offering two packages, one implemented on the AS/400, the other on the RS/6000. However, the systems can, in principle, run in any any hardware environment that supports IBM’s CallPath Services Architecture, announced in 1990. The standard example of how Computer-Integrated Telephony can help an organisation always seems to include Calling Line Identification – the ability of the system to identify the phone number of an incoming call before it has been answered, and to display the appropriate database record on the screen of the operator before they have even said hello. The trouble is that in the UK, this facility is available only to ISDN users accepting a call from another ISDN user. T

his lack of intelligent signalling between public and private networks seriously diminishes the appeal of Computer-Integrated Telephony, but in June, IBM launched another key ingredient – its proprietary speech processing unit which is linked to both the telephone system and host computer.

Tone-dial

IBM will supply the speech processing unit as part of the total solution. Without calling line identification facilities, the speech processing unit is the next-best thing – customers armed with an account number, for example, can identify themselves to the machine at the beginning of the call by speaking their number or dialling it with their tone-dial phones – it’s not so neat, but it still works. IBM estimates that the potential investment in the UK on computer supported telephony applications will be UKP100m this year. But this market will not be fully-open to IBM until it gets access to GEC Plessey’s ISDX PABX, which has around a 66% share of the UK market. Currently IBM’s CallPath Services Architecture is supported on the Siemens AG HiCom and Northern Telecom Ltd’s Meridian PABXs, although GEC Plessey’s iSDX will support it later this year, says IBM.