Octel Communications

» see octel.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Robert Cohn and Peter Olson met in 1981 because a piece of electronic equipment worked in the lab and not in the field, and Cohn phoned Olson to complain about it. They founded Octel in September 1982 to sell corporate voice messaging, shipped in 1984, were profitable by 1985 and went public in 1988. The first product was called Aspen, and it could hold up to seventy five hundred mailboxes on one system, which tells you what kind of customer they were after.

The market it served does not exist anymore in the form Octel knew it. A large company in 1988 wanting voicemail bought a refrigerator-sized machine, installed it in a room next to the phone switch, and paid somebody to keep it running. Octel sold that machine better than anyone. Revenue was $19 million in 1986 and $338.5 million by 1993. By 1992 it held about a fifth of the corporate voicemail market and more than a third of voice information services, and it kept buying its way wider: Ameritech's Tigon in late 1992, then a merger with VMX in early 1994 in a stock swap worth around $150 million. VMX had shipped the first commercial voicemail system, so Octel ended up owning the origin of its own industry.

Lucent bought it in September 1997 for $1.8 billion at $31 a share. Octel became Lucent's Octel Messaging Division and Cohn became an executive vice president, staying until he retired in April 1999. In September 2000 Lucent spun its enterprise business out as Avaya, and Octel went along in the box. The systems ran on in corporate basements for years after the name stopped meaning a company.

This one is genuinely outside anything I touched. Corporate voice messaging was an American office product sold to American telecom departments, and the Turkish version of leaving a message in the nineties was a home answering machine or, quite soon after, a text message. My generation skipped the entire category. We went from the phone ringing in an empty house to SMS without ever developing the office habit of talking to a machine for forty seconds.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

It is worth being precise about what Octel actually sold, because voicemail sounds trivial now. The product was a computer that answered thousands of telephone lines at once and wrote the audio to disk, filed by extension, retrievable later by pressing digits. In the early eighties that was hard. Storage was expensive enough that the audio had to be compressed to fit, and the whole system had to be more reliable than the phone switch it hung off, since a failure meant an entire company's calls fell into nothing.

The interface it standardized is the more lasting artifact. Press one to listen to your messages, press seven to delete the one you are on. That grammar was not obvious, it had to be invented, and it survived long enough that people who have never seen the hardware still know the key sequence in their fingers.

~ the inheritance ~

The thing that eventually undid the category was not a better voicemail company. It was that leaving a voice message stopped being how people communicate. Email took the asynchronous office message, then SMS took the personal one, and the recorded voice retreated to the small set of situations where nothing else works. Google's GrandCentral, which became Voice, and the transcription services that followed all understood the medium as something to convert into text rather than something to listen to.

Octel's machines are still an odd monument to a communication style that had a fifteen year window. There was a period when your recorded greeting was a small piece of professional identity, and people rehearsed them. Then the window closed, and the whole apparatus that supported it became the reason people under thirty do not answer the phone.

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