Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) describes the broad category of applications that involve connecting a phone system to a computer. CTI makes it possible for a computer to receive data from an incoming call and process it into something useful for your business. The most common example is using caller ID information to bring up the appropriate database file on a computer screen.
CTI is not just call centres and desktop PC software applications that let you dial from your PC, send faxes and store voice messages. There's an enormous range of innovative CTI opportunities in between these two extremes - including unified messaging, international call back, and communication "assistants" based on agent technology.
The perennial problem of market acceptance of CTI products is that telecom and computer systems departments are still separate lines items on the budget. Convergence is, therefore, as much a management infrastructure issue as it is a technological one.
There are also reliability problems. Telephone systems are designed to have a mean time between failure (MTBF) that is measured in years and often decades. The MTBF of many a computer platform can often be measured in hours. This may well be the biggest hurdle of all for a CTI product. No business is going to accept a telephone system that is useless with a power failure, or crashes sending untold hundreds or thousands of calls into oblivion.
The shift has started though. A September 1999 study by The Phillips Group-Info Tech concluded that 90 percent of companies with multiple locations would begin moving from their conventional telephone systems to IP telephony within the next five years.
