Patent ID: 6920143

Claim:
A computer telephony system comprising: computer telephony platforms having resources that provide computer telephony services; service modules residing on each of the platforms, wherein the service modules manipulate the resources according to platform-dependent protocols to facilitate performance of the computer telephony services for other service modules, and communication among the service modules uses message packets having a common, platform-independent protocol, each of the message packets including one of a common set of commands and one of a set of parameters, each of the commands being operative with respect to one of the parameters to define one of the computer telephony services to be provided by one of the resources; intra-platform packet routers residing on the platforms and configured to route message packets having intra-platform destination addresses to local service modules, including message packets originating from a platform on which an intra-platform packet router resides and having an intra-platform destination address to a service module residing on the platform, and route message packets having inter-platform destination addresses to an inter-platform interface; and an inter-platform packet router associated with the inter-platform interface, the inter-platform router routing message packets having inter-platform destination addresses received from the intra-platform routers to one of the intra-platform routers residing on one of the platforms on which the service modules indicated by the inter-platform address reside.