Octel

Octel

Tri-Star Telecommunications is proud to be a licensed distributor of the telephone answering voice mail system and phone products created by Octel Communications Corporation. Octel has a long and proud history of leadership in the telecom industry, and with their cutting edge technology, they continue to innovate and revolutionize today.

Octel—short for Olson/Cohen Telecommunications—is named for its co-founders, Peter Olson and Robert Cohen. Mr. Olsen was an engineer, and Mr. Cohen was a product manager for a hardware company. In 1981, the two met when Olsen was called into Cohen's office to explain why a specific part worked in the lab, but not outside of it. Cohen was so impressed by Olsen that the two decided that they could both benefit by going into business together.

The two decided that their new company, Octel, was going to tackle the multinational giant International Business Machines—IBM—whose industry-standard voice messaging systems were large, clunky, and pricey. Their first product was planned: a voicemail system no larger than a broom closet (at the time, IBM's took up a large room), and with a flexible enough design to work with all of the best modern telephones (no one else's did.)

They exceeded their own goals with ease, creating a voicemail system the size of a large suitcase that sold for 20% of what a competing IBM system sold for—and Octel's worked with more phones and had more features, despite its smaller size and price tag. Voicemail was no longer just for the large corporate world. Now, smaller companies and even individual users would have access to it.

Voicemail machines are basically dedicated computers that essentially record and play back files of human voice recordings and can connect calls to any of a number of specific phones based on their selections on a series of menus. When they first came out, Octel voice mail machines used low-quality (i.e. smaller) files to save disk space, resulting in sometimes substandard voice quality from the machine. Today's interactive voice recordings are much more robust, with almost no discernable loss of quality.

Because the voice files are stored digitally rather than on a tape or other 'hard' medium, the data on a voicemail system can be manipulated just like other files—copied, moved, or even edited like a computer sound file can be. This allows things like the forwarding of identical messages to multiple extension mailboxes of users at the firm.

Octel received a huge boost to its business in 1987 when local phone companies were allowed to start offering services like voicemail on their phone lines, but they weren't allowed to make their own hardware—so many of them purchased their systems from Octel. In very short order, the four-year-old startup became the largest manufacturer of voicemail systems. Since that day, they have continuously kept their products at the forefront of the business telephone system market, releasing PBX, then mini-PBX, and now they are rapidly moving into the Unified Communications field.

As an authorized Octel dealer, Tri-Star Telecommunications is pleased to offer our customers the full line of quality Octel products. When you order Octel products from Tri-Star, you also get industry leading customer support, the lowest prices available, and access to an international network of certified telecom technician that can install, maintain and repair your Octel system. Call us today at (800) 211-6200 and find out how Octel products can help your business