Opportunities for Third-Party Vendors

Web telephony technology offers a platform to facilitate cooperation between many industry segments:

• Vendors of voice boards, Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) BRI (144,000 bits per second, two voice channels), ISDN PRI (1,544,000 bits per second, 30 voice channels), and station emulation boards can create TAPI drivers for their hardware.
• Vendors of speech products can create Service Access Point (SAP) IDs to bind applications to their speech boards or engines.
• Vendors of development tools can use the debugging COM objects of the Web Telephony Engine (WTE) to create tools to develop Web telephony applications. Those vendors add value by providing monitoring and analysis tools that help administrators fine-tune their applications to better serve their customers over time. For more information, see Developing a Debugging Application.
• Vendors of telephony technology (for example, caller verification and directory assistance) can provide ActiveX® components.

These vendor-supplied components can be used together with Web telephony technology to create a dual-access Web site or pure IVR applications in industry sectors such as finance, insurance, real estate, health care, travel, and telemarketing.

Authorized resellers can use Web telephony to tailor solutions such as those shown in the diagram in About Interactive Voice Response. Software vendors that provide IVR application generators and those that develop Internet authoring tools can provide authoring environments for this system. Because Web telephony technology is open and standards based, vendors need to comply with the published set of HTML attributes and telephony-specific ActiveX interfaces. Vendors of Internet management tools can develop capacity planning, statistical analysis, and other management tools in the same way.