For the Record: CTI Group Addresses VoIP Shortcoming

Financial brokers must have it. Lawyers would like to have it. Consumers could be dangerous with it. VoIP doesn’t have it, but soon will for service providers – including cable operators – offering hosted IP Centrex services to small-to-medium business (SMB) customers. “The features that you get from a hosted Centrex provider today often are not equivalent to what you could get from a traditional switched or TDM telephony environment. One of those features is call recording,” said Sid Rao, chief technologies for CTI Group, which has, of course, developed a technology to fill that hole. The very promise of IP Centrex is its flexibility to make a soft network look like a hard-wired service. Its drawback is that those companies that need to record calls have to buy equipment for each location – remote offices, work-at-home users – and that expense kills the IP cost savings. CTI has developed a scalable recorder that it will either host or place next to a service provider’s switch that can record conversations and provide playbacks to end users. “Typically, the provider has never recorded phone conversations on behalf of their end users and delivered them back,” said Rao. CTI has pitched its technology to “a variety of tier 2 and tier 3 voice over IP providers,” and that pitch “has worked,” he said. It’s also turned its attention to less conventional – at least coming from the telecommunications space – providers where it is also having success. “Part of our customer base includes cable operators, including Cox Business Services,” Rao said. “We are definitely looking at cross-pollinating our efforts with some of the other cable providers." – Jim Barthold