In contrast, Siemens, which has in the United States usually sold directly to enterprises, lacks professional services on a sufficient level to support wide-scale enterprise adoption. So it's making its Web services infrastructure available only to developers and very large organizations, says Graham Howard, Siemens' director of global marketing, large systems.
There are also big variations in platform capabilities. All the vendors providing SOA interfaces allow for abstracted APIs to provide basic call control. Avaya, which has always focused on the contact center as its core business, was the first to orchestrate underlying services to address more sophisticated process requirements, such as the ability to assign tasks to users, then track their progress, what Avaya calls Notify with Task List. To offer a similar capability, other providers must blend several services, increasing complexity.
In December, BlueNote added presence and an outbound notification framework to its SOA capabilities, enabling companies to send messages via e-mail, SMS, and phone and bring back user or customer responses. That's helpful in the event of a stock alert or for confirming mobile payments, or for maintaining employee schedules, for example.
The other major difference among vendors is around the underlying components needed to take advantage of SOA capabilities--here, the watchword for most is "proprietary." All require IT to use their underlying telephony servers and messaging servers, but Avaya goes so far as to build its own ESB to communicate with other messaging services. Cisco SONA is the most extreme example, with its bundling of SOA acceleration, security, and management into Cisco networking hardware.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
