By embedding communications within SOAs, vendors including Avaya, BlueNote Networks, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, NEC/Sphere, Nortel Networks, and Siemens say companies can dramatically improve personal productivity by enriching user interactions while increasing efficiency. Admins could be automatically notified in the event of an outage or slowdown, for example.

It's not a new vision, but in a tight economic climate these are the types of initiatives that help IT improve business processes--and the bottom line.

When we first reported on this blending of service-oriented architectures and telephony, back in August 2006, we dubbed the phenomenon "service-oriented telephony architecture," or SOTA. More recently the term CEBP, coined by Avaya for "communications-enabled business process," has become popular. Cisco prefers "service-oriented network architecture," or SONA. Whatever you call it, this next wave in unified communications (UC) focuses on melding communications with business processes.

But our analysis suggests the biggest challenge will be overcoming IT skepticism. Our recent InformationWeek survey shows that in the coming 24 months, only 20% of organizations will embed communications within their business processes. In response, vendors are increasingly bundling UC capabilities with their voice products, just to get the technology in the door. But will that be enough?

"We think it's great, and we haven't deployed it," says Erik Brokaw, enterprise architect at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City. It's simply a matter of resources. "We're in the middle of a significant reengineering effort, and it's going to get lumped into that," Brokaw says. He expects to deploy later this year or early 2009.

FIRST THINGS FIRST
Organizational productivity and personal productivity define the collaboration continuum today. Where communication vendors fall into this range depends on their technology offerings, partnerships, and supporting channel structure. We're seeing some competitors pair up to meet demand, while others are looking to offer everything by themselves.

Until recently, for example, Microsoft has provided SOA and UC separately. That's going to change, according to Eric Swift, senior director of unified communications, with Microsoft's forthcoming offering geared toward the desktop, in contrast to Avaya's contact center focus. Among partners, IBM is teaming with Nortel.

One key fact highlighted when we first noted this trend still holds true: To be successful, IT must identify process latencies within their organizations before jumping into automated communications. Yes, this is business process analysis voodoo, but our survey shows areas where embedding telephony services could really accelerate business change.

By far the most popular is helping resolve customer complaints by automatically notifying principal parties. Readers also cite preventing infrastructure problems by monitoring machine-to-machine communications, then initiating an emergency conference call in the event of a failure and organizing an emergency summit to address a significant change in a business metric, such as a falling stock price.

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