If you ask ten people the definition of what Unified Communications is, you will probably get ten different answers. Or a lot of strange looks. While Unified Communications is technically a business or marketing term, it helps to look back over the evolution of the telephone to try and understand where we are today and where this industry might be heading. We will try and put this in plain English and keep the technical lingo to a minimum so hopefully everyone can understand what Unified Communications means today.
Many people know that back in 1876 Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. It was one of the most profound and significant discoveries of the last century. The telephone, like any good technology had a few kinks to work out for before it took off and achieved mass adoption. Initially, each telephone needed to be hard wired to each other telephone on the other side. This essentially made the telephones at either end of the wire a very expensive intercom because they could only talk to each other.
After listening to a lecture by Alexander Graham Bell in New Haven, Connecticut in 1877, George W. Coy with a budget of less than forty dollars built the first switchboard out of tea kettle parts, bustle wire and carriage bolts. Genius! The system was capable of connecting up to 64 phones with a maximum of two parties (two – two way conversations) talking at any give time! A switchboard required a human operator to physically move jumper wires and make the physical connections between the two parties telephones. At that time up to six physical connections were required to make a singe call. Switchboards were essential to providing phone service to small areas. They were mostly used to connect hospitals, post offices, fire stations and emergency services. By February 1878 people were chomping at the bit to give the newly formed New Haven District Telephone Company $1.50 per month for the privilege of having a telephone and the ability to communicate with other people in the community. Flash forward two years and the New Haven District Telephone company had the rights from Bell Telephone Company to service all of Connecticut and western Massachusetts. This was the first telephone exchange in the United States and, fun fact, the site was a National Historic Landmark from April, 1965 until 1973 where it lost that status and was converted into a big, beautiful parking garage.
The telephone exchanges rode the digital transformation wave sweeping the globe and they pivoted from human switchboard operators to current day software and algorithmic ones that could switch calls in milliseconds. One hundred years later and the telephone exchanges have grown to become one of the largest and most powerful monopolies in the United States. The government broke up AT&T into seven smaller “Baby Bell” companies in January 1982 as part of a divestiture agreement.
Beginning in the 1960’s a lot of business had a problem they needed to solve. How could they give a telephone to every employee at the company without spending a fortune on monthly charges with the telephone company? They discovered that they could buy their own switchboards and hire their own operator to make the physical connections between employees and calls going to or coming from the central office. Just like that a new industry was born. Enter the Private Branch Exchange or PBX.
PBX systems, which are still in use today, use the phone company’s analog or digital circuits to deliver phone calls from a central office (CO) to the customers business premise. The PBX switchboard operator accepted the call and routed it to the appropriate company extension via jumper cables that the switchboard operator plugged in and the hardwired copper cables connecting the phones. This allowed the business to achieve economy’s of scale and reduce costs by purchasing a fraction of the central office lines as it had extensions. There are very complicated calculators to figure out how many CO lines you needed given a number of employees but we will spare you the gory details. A common ratio would be 30 to 1. So for every 30 phones or extensions, a company could order 1 analog or digital line from the central office and pay the monthly fee. A 300 person company could get by with 30 lines from the central office as an example.
By the 1970’s the PBX was slowly evolving and being improved which led to the first must have feature. The Interactive Voice Response (IVR) aka Automated Attendant! This technology allowed businesses to drive down costs and become more efficient by replacing the human switchboard operators with an automated call routing engine within the PBX. The next challenge was that callers couldn’t rely on human operators to reassure the caller that their call was being connected. The solution was the dial tone and DTMF which was ubiquitous by the end of the decade.
Now you may be thinking what does this possibly have to do with Unified Communications! Bear with us…
As the technology evolved, additional features and functionality was in high demand and became necessary. What happened if someone called me and I was away from my desk? What happened if I was busy and talking to someone else on my extension? The next must have feature was voicemail! Companies like AT&T, IBM and dozens of others competed against each other in the early eighties to come up with a scalable, reliable voicemail system. A company called ROLM was the first to have a integrated voicemail with thier PBX platform that could light up a message waiting light or play a stutter tone in the users ear to alert them to a new voicemail message. Octel Communications, founded in 1982, innovated substantially in this time while patenting new features which contributed heavily to is success in creating smaller, faster, more reliable voicemail systems to the enterprise market. In 1990, they were one of the first companies to introduce the concept of unified messaging! Okay so now we are getting one step closed to cracking the definition of Unified Communications!