This wasn't going to be a north-of-the-panhandle, sour-creamed, sweet-bell-pepper toll-savings VoIP. Heck no, it was dial tone, with all the fixin's. The full combo PBX plate included call waiting, hold, transfer, forwarding and caller ID. But that's not all. The plan included voice and e-mail, text-to-speech, autoattendant and IVR (interactive voice response) features, as well as conference calling, direct dialing and distinctive ringing, with an obligatory dollop of toll savings.

If you listened to all the buzz around VoIP back in 1999, unified communications seemed doable. So with a strong commitment to Cisco's AVVID CallManager gear, Advanta set off on a project it believed would begin yielding fruit in a few months. Of course, in hindsight it's clear that the hype surrounding VoIP and the prophesied imminent convergence of the voice and data worlds masked a lack of call forwarding, weak autoattendant functionality and no integration of e-mail and voice mailboxes.

Lumps, Bumps and More Than a Couple of Months

The autoattendant functionality in the Cisco AVVID product was inadequate for a service provider as it did not support multitenancy. It also did not offer conditional branching or any way to identify callers distinctly as separate customer groups. This meant that for Advanta to create a commercially viable service, it had to add a separate autoattendant. Advanta decided to license Interactive Intelligence's Enterprise Interaction Center for autoattendant functionality.

A bigger issue was the need to "hairpin" calls going to a customer-service agent out of the autoattendant. Calls could not be forwarded off the PBX because of a lack of integration. To transfer to a live customer-service agent, a second call had to be placed to that agent and then bridged to the original call. For the duration of the call, both lines had to remain up. Remember: This was a hosted service, with the PBX not on the customers site, meaning both calls had to travel the PSTN. If you're thinking clunky, add expensive, not for the customer of the service, but for the host, Advanta. My eyes water thinking about it.

Adding ketchup to salsa, VoIP handsets were listing for a ridiculous $600 each. Even fully discounted units cost $400 -- a price at which there was no revenue or profit for Advanta. Here again Advanta's customers were shielded from these capital charges because of their service model. They paid a monthly fee and were happy with the service. They were, however, concerned about the viability of the business model for Advanta, as was Advanta itself.

Finally, there wasn't -- and still isn't -- a good way to perform NAT (Network Address Translation) functions at branch and home offices. This isn't much of a problem for branches, as Advanta extends a private network to each branch, supplying a router and DHCP server for phone traffic. Initially Advanta was using T1 lines, but then found the CoS (Class of Service) of ATM, the flexible bandwidth and, surprisingly, the cost a much better fit.

Later (Much Later) Back at the Ranch

Advanta's Unified-Messaging Solution Click here to enlarge

The service as originally launched proved not to be a viable business model. At the end of 1999, for Advanta to address these known problems the cost would have topped $700,000. The company didn't know the dollar amount it would take to make a viable business model. Advanta knew the service would work eventually but acknowledged that it was just too early. This meant pulling the service from customers. Advanta did the right thing by leaving the service up and helping each customer onto another PBX service, a costly action.

Still committed to the vision of unified communications, Advanta went back to the drawing board for 18 months, working with Cisco on its TAPI (Telephony API) integration into the AVVID product and licensing the CIC (Customer Interaction Center) from Interactive Intelligence.

TAPI integration solved the hairpin-call problem, the interaction with the external autoattendant and even the text-to-voice e-mail playing of .wav files. This last item provides a 10:1 compression, making a 30-second voice message 30 KB in size. The solution was reliable, comprehensible (according to Advanta) and downloadable over dial-up. CIC brought skills-based routing, fax, Web call-back, CRM-based screen pops, logging, reporting and real-time monitoring.

Advanta is now, at long last, delivering PBX functionality and some enhanced unified messaging for less than $3 per phone per day, including voicemail, e-mail and an e-mail reader. Compared with traditional PBX systems (sans unified messaging and CRM functionality) that usually run $3.50 to $4.50 per phone per day, this is a huge victory for Advanta customers. It ain't bad for Advanta, either.