CRN: How did you become interested in CTI?

Bill Uncapher: Last year, I heard Laura Skinner [former vice president and general manager of Ingram Micro Inc.'s Telecom Integration Division] at Ingram Micro's CT summit. She said that all the enterprise technologies are becoming a natural part of the networking infrastructure and that, if we don't understand them, someone else will own the network. That made total sense to me. Laura and I later formulated a road map for our company.

CRN: How has your convergence expertise evolved?

Uncapher: We started six months ago with videoconferencing solutions,first ISDN, then IP-based,from Polycom Inc., one of the easiest CTI applications to implement. We later partnered with Comdial [Corp.], a maker of NT-based phone systems. We've started to be successful in that space. But in the beginning, the technology proved to be a big challenge.

CRN: How so?

Uncapher: Dealing with the long-distance and local phone companies was a new experience. Also, it took us a few months to understand all the telecom lingo, technology and culture, which is completely different from the data world's. On the data side, we talk about mission-critical servers and 24x7 service. But it's not the level required of voice systems, which typically have to be served within two hours of a power failure.

CRN: Are telephony products more difficult to master?

Uncapher: Technically, phone systems are not as challenging as dealing with, say, NT servers and RAID systems, but they're different. You have to learn the technology and be comfortable with it. Ultimately, we had to hire a telecom-savvy person to lead our CTI group to bridge the gap.

CRN: Do converged solutions also require that you interface with different people within an organization?

Uncapher: We're finding we're dealing with the same [MIS] people now as technologies converge. [Convergence VARs] will ultimately prevail over the traditional interconnects, I believe, as telephony purchasing decisions are transferred to traditional MIS people.

CRN: How much do you expect to earn from converged solutions this year?

Uncapher: We're looking to do from $2.5- [million] to $3 million in CTI sales on $19- million in [total] revenue. That includes cabling, which we recently got into by starting a new cabling division. To fully control the [enterprise] network infrastructure, cabling has to be part of the portfolio.

CRN: Are you considering other solutions?

Uncapher: We're working with [unified messaging developers] Active Voice [Corp.] and eVoice [Inc.]. We feel unified messaging will be one of the big technologies next year, after clients finishing dealing with Y2K. The demand will be huge because unified messaging is a natural extension of corporate E-mail applications, such as [Microsoft Corp.] Exchange. The addition of speech recognition will make it an even better offering.

CRN: Have converged technologies met your expectations?

Uncapher: Largely they have. They're new and exciting technologies that add a lot of value and make our clients more productive. They're not 100 percent perfect, but I think the benefits outweigh the risks.

Some telephony VARs at an interconnect meeting I attended said businesses won't tolerate rebooting NT [-based PBXes] and having their phone systems down. I responded that less than 100 percent reliability of wireless networks hasn't stopped [widespread buying] of cell phones. And NT-based PBXes are certainly more reliable than cell phone technology.