Microsoft specification challenges Novell API for developer interest

Dallas

If last week's Computer Telephony Expo here was any indication, Microsoft Corp.'s Telephony Application Programming Interface (TAPI) is enjoying a surge of developer interest that threatens to overwhelm a rival API from Novell, Inc.

At the show were nearly 60 service providers and applications developers that back TAPI because, they said, it is more flexible than Novell's offering and will later this year become a standard feature in both Windows NT and Windows 95.

But analysts warned that neither of the computer-telephone integration (CTI) schemes is widely deployed, and both are more expensive than advertised.

While Microsoft's TAPI appears to be picking up steam, Novell's Telephony Services Application Programming Interface (TSAPI) has garnered few users since its delivery last May. According to Sheila McGee-Smith, Dallas-based director of analysis and forecasting for Pelorus Group, a market research firm in Raritan, N.J., Novell, AT&T and Comdial Corp. have made only about 20 sales of TSAPI-based products totaling no more than 2,000 desktops. AT&T and Comdial are believed to be the only two private branch exchange manufacturers to have delivered TSAPI products.

Officials of TSAPI's most prominent application developer - Aurora Systems, Inc. in Acton, Mass. - said the number is closer to 50 customers and 3,500 stations. But at an earlier PBX conference in Washington, D.C., Allan Sulkin, president of TEQConsult Group, Inc., a market research firm in Hackensack, N.J., said all flavors of desktop CTI combined have had little market impact.

Some developers are shying away from TSAPI because it requires a NetWare Loadable Module (NLM) on the Novell server to run the telephony functions.

Loading NLMs is "a baroque and arcane art, and I did not want to force my developers through it," said Alec Miloslavsky, senior vice president of engineering at Genysys Labs in San Bruno, Calif., a provider of call center solutions.

Many of the 57 vendors at the show that support, though not necessarily yet deliver, TAPI also described the specification as more scalable than TSAPI. The Novell API can only send third-party call control instructions across NetWare LANs, and enterprise networks are likely to include a variety of network operating systems (NOS), they pointed out.

"TAPI is currently the only mass-market API that does not dictate the server platform and network environment," said Carl Strathmeyer, vice president of the CTI division at Dialogic Corp. in Parsippany, N.J.

Developers applaud Microsoft's plan to include TAPI at no cost in Windows 95 and provide access to TAPI for current Windows users off the Internet. "It's a Windows world," said Kelly Conway, senior vice president of Technology Solutions Co. in Chicago.

An irritated Art Schoeller, AT&T's director of client/server telephony, said Microsoft partisans were spreading "foo-foo dust" about TSAPI's limitations. Yet AT&T will try to port TSAPI to other NOSes, including Windows NT.

And while Novell CEO Bob Frankenberg told the conference that TSAPI is a more flexible platform because it requires only a connection between the PBX and server - instead of between the telephone and personal computer on each desktop - Microsoft officials said TAPI can operate in either mode.

For example, although early TAPI implementations generally required a physical interface between each PC and telephone, Dialogic last week announced a TAPI server called CT-Connect that does not require a physical desktop connection.

Other TAPI implementations do require a hardware interface at each desktop. For example, Northern Telecom, Inc. offers a $200 adapter that sits between the phone and PC. The PBX maker then offers Aurora Systems software that handles point-and-click dialing and other functions, and costs about $600 a copy. Likewise, TSAPI solutions generally cost at least $1,000 a seat, confirmed Carl Pavarini, vice president of emerging markets for AT&T Global Business Communications Systems.

Meaningful applications riding on top of the APIs can run as much as $5,000 per seat with systems integration work, Pelorus Group's McGee-Smith said.

And although Novell claimed that Siemens Rolm Communications, Inc. and Northern Telecom would finally deliver their TSAPI drivers in the second quarter, Northern Telecom said that was not the case.