By embedding communications within SOAs, vendors 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 this blending of service-oriented architectures and telephony was reported, back in August 2006, the phenomenon was dubbed "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 focuses on melding communications with business processes.
But analysis suggests the biggest challenge will be overcoming IT skepticism.
Source: Intelligent Enterprise, http://intelligententerprise.com