Overview

Throughout the past two decades, business users have sought to find a means of integrating their telephony and computing systems. One can only imagine the great demand for this, assuming the computer and communications budgets are in the same domain. If one were to come up with a totally integrated package, there would be unimaginable savings (or so the story goes). It has been the goal of many organizations to reap the benefit of a single infrastructure.

In the past, the Management Information Systems (MIS) department and the voice communications department were separate entities, yet their operating budgets and staff overlapped in certain areas. The degree of overlap varied by organization, but the overlap itself was the concern. Since the convergence began nearly a decade ago, the fundamental shifts in these operations were somewhat dramatic. These shifts were not explosive in themselves, but more in line with a slowly rolling wave. In many camps within the industry, however, these changes were virtually unnoticeable.

The driving forces behind this convergence combined with voice communications for a commodity-priced service, data communications for an open standard in the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) world, and the preponderance of Local Area Network (LAN) technologies overtaking the desktop. From the very beginning of these three disparate technologies, end users looked to the manufacturers to come up with an integrated scheme. It was through the initial offerings of AT&T, IBM, and DEC (albeit all proprietary) that the computer and communications convergence began.