Avaya, IBM announce SOA-based contact center

NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: STEVE TAYLOR AND JIM METZLER ON WIDE
AREA NETWORKING
08/04/05
Today's focus: Avaya, IBM announce SOA-based contact center

Dear networking.world@gmail.com,

In this issue:

* What value does Avaya and IBM's SOA-based contact center
  announcement hold?
* Links related to Wide Area Networking
* Featured reader resource
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Today's focus: Avaya, IBM announce SOA-based contact center

By Steve Taylor and Jim Metzler

Today, we take a break from the newsletters on reader feedback
about telecom user groups to bring you some breaking news that's
happening at SpeechTEK this week.

In previous newsletters, we have talked about the emergence of
service-oriented architectures (SOA) and Web services and the
advantages that they offer. This week at SpeechTEK, Avaya and
IBM jointly announced their intention to bring a SOA approach to
contact centers.

We believe that a SOA holds promise in a number of situations.
We also believe that the advantages of a SOA and Web services
seem particularly well suited to the challenges facing contact
centers - to enable flexible business processes in a cost and
time efficient manner.

The Avaya/IBM announcement outlined some short-term initiatives,
such as Avaya selecting the IBM WebSphere voice server and the
IBM WebSphere application server as the initial speech and
middleware platforms for the Avaya voice portal, which is
Avaya's new Web services-based speech and service platform.

However, companies that are attempting to develop a SOA for
whatever purpose have found out how difficult the task can be.
The Avaya/IBM announcement was weak relative to outlining a
longer-term vision. This means that users have to see enough
value in the announcement that they are willing to take it upon
themselves to develop a new contact center architecture from
scratch, or else pay consulting fees to a company who will to do
that for them.

In order for the Avaya/IBM approach to have a truly major
impact, the industry needs a widely accepted roadmap for how
contact centers are evolving and what steps companies should
take to get there. Such a roadmap would allow companies to
determine if this approach makes sense for them without first
having to invest significant resources.

Read about the Avaya/IBM announcement on Avaya's Web site:
<http://www.networkworld.com/nlwan4424>.

Back to reader comments about telecom user groups next week.

The top 5: Today's most-read stories

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<http://www.networkworld.com/nlwan4427>

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<http://www.networkworld.com/nlwan4429>
_______________________________________________________________
To contact: Steve Taylor and Jim Metzler

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates
and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. For more detailed
information on most of the topics discussed in this newsletter,
connect to Webtorials <http://www.webtorials.com/>, the premier
site for Web-based educational presentations, white papers, and
market research. Taylor can be reached at
<mailto:taylor@webtorials.com>

Jim Metzler is the Vice President of Ashton, Metzler &
Associates, a consulting organization that focuses on leveraging
technology for business success. Jim assists vendors to refine
product strategies, service providers to deploy technologies and
services, and enterprises evolve their network infrastructure.
He can be reached at <mailto:jim@ashtonmetzler.com>
_______________________________________________________________
This newsletter is sponsored by Ciena
NetworkWorld Special Report - The Adaptive WAN: The factors
driving WAN evolution

A combination of business and technology trends are changing the
demands on the enterprise WAN. This NetworkWorld Special Report
explores some of the key business and technology trends that are
driving and enabling the evolution of the enterprise WAN and how
the enterprise WAN can become adaptive to support these trends.
http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=109233
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