Queue E-Mail Newsletter

for the Week of Jun 29, 2007

Sponsored by
Tech Excel

Application Development 2.0 - Myths and Realities

Learn how to avoid 'development finger pointing' through knowledge-centric Application Lifecycle Management. http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Queuecasts&id;=29

Application Development 2.0 - Myths and Realities

Learn how to avoid 'development finger pointing' through knowledge-centric Application Lifecycle Management. http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Queuecasts&id;=29

New article on ACM Queue:

Getting Bigger Reach Through Speech

MIKE VIZARD: Hello, and welcome to another edition of the ACM Queuecast, with your host, Mike Vizard. Joining me today to talk about telephony development in technology such as SIP is Mark Ericson, director of product strategy for BlueNote Networks. Mark, welcome to the show.

MARK ERICSON: Thank you, Mike.

VIZARD: I don't think most people are familiar with BlueNote Networks, so why don't you just tell them a little bit about what it is you guys do, exactly?

ERICSON: Certainly. BlueNote Networks has a product line called Session Suite, which offers IP telephony as a software solution so it can be deployed and managed as software in an IT environment and delivers standard-based IP telephony but also offers web services or standard soap-based APIs for integrating voice as a service into business applications and business processes.

VIZARD: That's kind of interesting because telephony has been almost a force or an environment unto itself for all these years and you had to be a specialist in that area, and yet today we hear about the movement towards web-based standards in that area, and yet, there's not a lot of conversation linking that area or specialty to general purpose service-oriented architecture, development on the Web and all the standard technologies you see there, whether it's things like SOAP or things like Ajax. So I guess my question is, when are these two worlds going to come together, and what are the drivers to make that happen?

ERICSON: That's an excellent question. I think the two worlds are coming together. We certainly hear a lot about people interested in leveraging voice in ways that are better to drive business value in their organization, and see that some application business process integration might provide that. Also, the trend towards service-oriented architecture is a very standard common way to do application integration and building out new application infrastructure, I think we see these two trends converging, and I think the reason it hasn't been widely successful is that part of the problem is that the traditional approach to this is to take traditional telephony APIs and wrapper them as web-services, and traditional telephony APIs are more about the device than they are about the people that are interacting, so you look at some of these APIs, and they're very low level abstraction where you pretty much have to be a telephony expert to leverage those APIs and you have to be aware of the signaling that goes on in telephony and various states that take place, like off hook, and the volume of the device and a lot of details there.

So I think to be successful as Web services have brought up the level of abstraction for application integration is to deliver Web services APIs that are closer to the business application and business processes.

VIZARD: So does that mean then I'm essentially masking all that complexity from the developer community, but then you would get some kind of resistance from the people who are specialists in that area because they would say to themselves, well, I don't want everybody who's anybody who'd be a general purpose developer suddenly be a telephony developer. Are we really talking about a cultural issue versus a technology issue?

ERICSON: I think there are certainly cultural issues, and there are many organizations where there still are islands of the telephony people and infrastructure people that are separate from the applications people or where computer telephony integration is a very special skill that doesn't necessarily bring the application domain experience.

So I think as the business owners in an organization look at this, they certainly see the value of bringing telephony closer to the business problem they are trying to solve, and make it easy to add human communications in the business processes, and again, where this communication is about contacting a person, not ringing a device. So someone needs to be a ... to fulfil their role in some business process, these web service APIs can be leveraged in the application in a way that it'll contact that person over whatever channel, wherever they might be located to ring them to have them fulfill their role in that process.

VIZARD: So ultimately I want to target the person's role or even their identity rather than specifically the device they happen to be walking around with.

ERICSON: That's correct.

See all the latest articles and audio interviews with Queue's RSS Feeds