About

Welcome to the insideCTI blog.

Computer-Telephony Integration — the magic that makes your computer work like a phone and vice versa. It’s an acronym often used by contact center (formerly call center) folks to describe the technology that binds together computing and telecom to create more acronyms and buzzwords like SIP, VOIP, screen-pop, and Unified Communications (UC).

If just reading the last paragraph sent tingles down your leg then you are at the right place! You may work in the telecom industry or be part of a company’s telecom staff. You may be a contractor specializing in contact center implementations. You may be a CTO looking to broaden your understanding of contact center technologies. You may be a student looking to start a career in this area. Or maybe you just randomly stumbled upon this site and found my writing enjoyable (extra points for you!).

Whoever you are, I greatly appreciate the visit and any feedback. Now please allow me to introduce myself.

Eugene Liu (Twitter @eliu500) is my name and writing about CTI is my game. I have worked in contact center technologies for over 10 years. It all started after college (Computer Science) and graduate school (Computer Information Systems) when I was primed to enter the workforce as an aspiring software engineer. I answered an ad from alumni career services looking for a recent grad with VisualBasic, C/C++, etc. skills. Hey, that’s me! So I went for an interview and was bombarded with acronyms like IVR, CTI, DNIS, ANI, and PBX, along with a visually overwhelming whiteboarded diagram of T1s, ISDNs, trunks (say what?!), and telephones.

(Did you feel another tingle down your leg?) Of course, being the cautious interviewee, I nodded my head as much as I could and tried not to ask stupid questions (like “What the heck is DNIS and ANI?!”). So where does my mad programming skills come into the picture, I wondered.

To make a long story short… I was hired (thanks, John!) and did get my chance to do some traditional programming. VisualBasic was used to create some CTI screen-pop applications on the desktop, and C was used to create custom functions on the IVR application. But mostly it was learning to program on my very first IVR platform, the Nortel OPEN IVR. Programming on it was like using an unpolished Visio app to create auto answering services people hate.

Throughout the years I’d gotten acquainted with other platforms and tools: Intervoice (now part of Convergys), Avaya, Rockwell, Alcatel-Lucent, Genesys and GVP (acquired from VoiceGenie), OpenVXML (open source from OpenMethods), and other obscure (obsolete?) ones.

Today very much has changed in contact center technologies: Speech, VXML, SIP, new channels of interaction, etc. But the underlying goal is the same: advancing and improving customer interactions.

My hope is to make this site as entertaining as it is informative. Thank you.

(Thanks to Jared for the first logo!)

Disclosure: My retirement account holds shares of Apple, Google, Oracle, Acme Packet, and Polycom.