Can Nortel Converge Web Services And Telephony?

If you buy into the idea that converged communications means morethan just cheap phone calls or access to the corporate PBX fromanywhere, SOA and VoIP ought to be perfect partners. Exposingtelephony functions as reusable Web services should make them easierto integrate into other applications, and the same applies to all theother services like IM and video that are supposed to be convergingwith voice.

That's the thinking behind the SOA strategy Nortel announcedthis week, as well its partnership with IBM and its use ofWebSphere. But how much work still needs to be done to make IPtelephony part of SOA, and what kind  of composite apps will bebuilt on top of it?

The first question is the easiest to answer. If you define a Webservice as something that uses XML or HTTP, we're part way therealready with things like SIP and XMPP. Of course, they only covermetadata as far as VoIP is concerned (it can't even use TCP, letalone XML) but related data like instant messages can be carriedthrough a Web service.

But if you define Web services as conforming to the full WebServices stack, we're much further away. Nortel's announcement ismostly about addressing this, exposing a standardized API for third-party (and eventually, customer-built) apps.

What kind of apps will actually use it is a much harder question.The first one that Nortel announced is Lotus SameTime, through apartnership with IBM that will let SameTime users access Nortel voicefeatures. That could help unify VoIP with IM, but only for customerswho actually use an in-house IM server. Though SameTime is the marketleader in enterprise IM, that really isn't saying much. According toourresearch, most enterprises use the free services -- AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo.The biggest potential convergence between voice and IM could be inpresence: Wireless phones already track location, which could belinked up with the virtual status on IM. This could be a privacynightmare, but the popularity of services like Twitter suggest thatmany people would love to have their location broadcast.

Nortel rival Cisco has been selling a SOAP-based locationappliance for about two years, though so far this is used mainly fortracking things rather than people and it isn't integrated with VoIP.It'll be interesting to see what kind of applications Nortel userscome up with.