CTI², a provider of communications and messaging services to organizations and communications providers, today announced that the University of Michigan has chosen its unified messaging platform for trials for the university’s main communications system. The university’s communications infrastructure serves 60,000 users.

After the trial stage, the deal is valued at $500,000-1 million. In the added value services tender, CTI² competed against Comverse Technology (Nasdaq: CMVT) and Nortel Networks (NYSE:NT). CTI² was chosen together with Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO), which will provide the data communications infrastructure, and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), which will supply the e-mail servers.

The deal is very important for CTI², for several reasons. First of all, the University of Michigan is considered one of the largest, most important, and most influential universities in the US where communications and technological innovation is concerned. The choice of CTI²’s system is expected to open many other doors in the both the communications and organizational markets.

Secondly, CTI² defeated Comverse and Nortel, the university’s former providers of voice mailboxes. The third point, the most important for CTI², is that the University of Michigan’s communications system is identical to those that communications operators provide to organizations as part of hosting services. Once the system is fully operational, it will prove that CTI²’s platform can be used for the hosting services provided by communications operators.

What hosting services do the communications providers offer? Not every small or medium-sized organization wishes to assume the high cost of maintaining a PBX (Private Branch Exchange or private telephone switchboard) and platform for voice mailboxes and other added value services. Organizations that wish to avoid these costs can get the service directly from communications operators. The communications provider buys the platform, which is installed in its facilities, and provides the organization with the service.

The University of Michigan’s communications infrastructure includes eight of Cisco’s IP PBXs. The campus is therefore a large site, with infrastructure similar to that of a small town, with distributed telephony traffic installed in many buildings. All this communications will pass through CTI²’s systems.

Actually each such PBX resembles the center of a small organization. The ability of CTI²’s system to integrate all the centers and control the communications traffic between them, including added value services, will in effect constitute an application for systems identical to the hosting services systems.

“Any communications provider that wants to see to what extent our platform is capable of providing hosting services can see how the system installed at the University of Michigan works,” says CTI² president and CEO Erez Marom.

“Initially, our system will provide voice mail, fax, SMS, and paging services. Every user will have one box that will receive all the messages. He can hear the voice message with any existing e-mail program, get voice and fax messages with one telephone number, and hear e-mail messages by telephone with speech-to-text technology. He can send faxes with attached files in WORD Excel, Power Point, etc. and get an SMS or beeper announcement that he has new messages. These services are made possible by the variety of interfaces, including Internet, telephone, PC application, and palm pilot interfaces.

“Our system was chosen after we showed that it was an open system that is easier to integrate with existing systems. One of the important criteria was the ability to connect to any existing system on the campus, including Nortel’s old PBXs and Cisco’s new PBXs. We were also asked to show that it was easy to connect to more than 10 different e-mail servers of Microsoft and other companies.”