Introduction to SOA Unified Communication

In the previous article, we introduced SOA and unified communication, including its overall concept and traffic business. Now we will continue to explain SOA and Unified Communication. First, let's review the four methods of SOA in speech. Then, we will introduce the situation of some products and vendors.

Four Methods of hybrid speech and SOA

Despite the bright future, the market is still in its initial stage, with only four major vendors. Avaya and Siemens work on SOA from the traditional telephone field, while BlueNote and Ubiquity have innovative value-added methods.

Both Avaya and Siemens have been pushing their respective PBX to the field of standardized software and have begun to add Web service interfaces to their respective PBX and unified communication functions.

As part of the "smart communication" Intelligent Communications) program, Avaya has been adding Web service interfaces to its own products for the past year and a half, includes the Communication Manager IP Phone software and Avaya Interaction Center multimedia Contact Center platform. Avaya is building new products based on distributed Web services from the very beginning, such as Avaya voice portal.

Although the interface is based on the Web service protocol, both Avaya and Siemens products are highly dependent on SIP, in order to achieve call control and Unified Communication, The Avaya Web service can also work together with its hybrid and TDM telephone system ). SIP is especially suitable for SOA environments because its architecture is Internet-centric and it is easy to separate applications and communication media from call processing.

As part of the application development environment architecture, Avaya also provides many tools for using communication services. It also provides Dialog Designer, this is a free open source code plug-in tool for voice Application designers.

Siemens provides features similar to Avaya, including its own software development kit SDK ). However, according to Alan Miller, group manager in charge of OpenScape channel technical support, Siemens used the SOA concept to develop a unified communication platform: HiPath OpenScape from the very beginning. Siemens has cooperated with Salesforce.com and Siebel to integrate the Unified Communication Web service and CRM application software. Now it is working with iIBM and SAP, embed the communication software component into the WebSphere Everyplace Service Delivery platform of IBM and NetWeaver of SAP. OpenScape runs on Microsoft's Live Communications ServerLCS. This server can be used together with other LCS servers and public instant messaging service providers to share status information.

BlueNote's SessionSuite series provide many software-based telephone services that can be distributed. These services run on typical data center servers and can be integrated with Microsoft's Active Directory and Radius, instead of using your own independent PBX configuration and management system. "Our business model is not focused on PBX and $200 desktop phones," said Bament of BlueNote. We do not provide modified CTI APIs. We provide software solutions ." BlueNote also provides tools for integration with existing PBX systems of other companies. The solution highlighted by BlueNote includes this advanced feature: Forward incoming calls based on business applications, for example, the broker/analyst example mentioned above, because SessionSuite can act as a service provider, it can also act as a service user.

Finally, Ubiquity Software provides the SIP-based application server: sip a/S application/server ), it aims to meet the performance and reliability requirements of telecom operators who are using SOA to quickly and cheaply deploy numerous consumer services. Appcelerator is an attachment that provides a structured environment, compilation engine, and many components-used to build, deploy, and manage applications based on Web Services and SOA; developer Studio is a set of plug-ins for the Eclipse Java development platform.

The biggest advantage of SOA in the telecom field is that you can quickly deploy many new services and integrate them with the back-end operation support system. Gruia said: "Even if a service fails, the loss will be greatly reduced ."

From tactics to strategy

IP voice VoIP (VoIP) continues to develop rapidly in enterprises. It is mainly used for cost control and integrated call center applications. However, like other Web technologies, the true function of Unified Communication is to combine them with other applications and functions to speed up and improve business processes and ultimately bring strategic advantages. "Integration is a process," says Lawrence Byrd, head of the Avaya IP Phone and mobile department. The ultimate goal is not only to allow VoIP to run on different types of cables. It will certainly have an impact on productivity and accelerate business processes ."

SOA provides an architecture that allows multiple business processes and applications to quickly and flexibly enjoy the benefits of Unified Communication, requiring only a few phone skills. However, if you want to develop applications that can work normally across many different back-end voice systems without re-coding, you need to have a set of common Unified Communication Web Service Description Language (WSDL) between communication vendors) definition and core features. Standards for status and other features of unified communication must also be constantly developed to promote interoperability in this emerging field.

Real-time communication in application environment tracking and expansion faces unique challenges. Jim Su, Avaya's SOA Marketing Manager, asked: "How do you track start, end, and call calls that start several days later, and then take the next step in the business process? How do you deal with problems such as scalability, network latency, and staff latency? This is completely different from changing the entries in the database ."

Take the Gartner company's Elliot for example. He believes that SOA is still a long time to be promoted. "Enterprises are still at the stage of deciding where to use business processes with communication capabilities," said Elliot. Now, you can integrate OpenScape and other Unified Communication Solutions Through typical APIs ". If you only integrate with an application, it will take on the service environment overhead, which is actually more difficult. One factor driving SOA is the desire to allocate this overhead to multiple applications ." Gruia agrees with this statement, but he warned that companies that are using this progressive thinking will need to pay integration fees in the future.

However, if you are already building SOA and many key business processes in your organization rely on real-time communication, so we can use the tools and infrastructure launched by the market to make real-time communication a Web service. Miller said: "You can now use existing fine-grained services to complete the work that needs to be done. In addition, you have considered that new Web Services will one day use more standardized and useful methods, use and publish these fine-grained services. You can start from somewhere and then expand it. This is the charm of SOA ."