Cash and Burn: Three Generations of Telephony Failures

Posted by David Greenfield
March 15, 2007

For at least the past 15 years, PBX vendors have talked about how IP telephony was going to transform business. First, it was telephony-API wars with then AT&T-Novell's TSAPI on one side and Microsoft's TAPI on the other. Both promised a brave new world of telephony control apps. Later there was SIP, which was going to let Web developers create voice applications as easily as they could create Web apps.

And yet today, VoIP sales have little to do with increased business value and nothing to do with transformation of the enterprise. The overwhelming majority purchase VoIP to replace a depreciated PBX. The reality is that despite the best efforts of the communications industry, telephony servers have never been a strategic buy.

So, be more than a bit skeptical when Avaya, Cisco and Nortel talk about "business process transformation" and "communication-enabled processes." These vendors are betting--for the third time--that what we want is for communications systems to become the core of our businesses. They're banking that companies will want their telephony systems to instantly locate, set up and track interactions for resolving pressing manufacturing problems or resolving key customer complaints.

And they're betting big. Early this month, Avaya introduced both an ESB for its IP PBX, dubbed the Communication Enabled Business Process (CEBP), and an event processor. With CEBP, Avaya claims to provide the framework for embedding communications within a business process without requiring detailed telephony knowledge. Application developers can now perform a complex set of telephony services by calling a single high-level Web service. "Notify & Respond," for example, contacts a set of users and uses Web-portal responses or a voice form to trigger additional workflows, while "Find & Call" locates users by trying multiple devices according to the user's preset preferences. Specific events can be monitored through an add-on product, the Event Processor.

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