* What value does Avaya and IBM's SOA-based contact center announcement hold?
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: https://www.avaya.com/gcm/master-usa/en-us/corporate/pressroom/pressreleases/2005/pr-050801a.htm.
Back to reader comments about telecom user groups next week.
