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SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Developers need to think about driving business transformation, rather than merely build VoIP applications that are capable of replacing the legacy communications infrastructure, Lawrence Byrd, Director of IP Telephony and Mobility, Avaya (News - Alert), said on Wednesday.

 

At the VoIP Developer Conference, Byrd told attendees that Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), enabled by Web Services (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI), are finally crossing over from the enterprise realm into the communications sector to help developers frame their applications into services. But the emphasis needs to stay focused on enabling people and business processes.

 

“What significant changes are we going to be part of?” Byrd asked rhetorically. “The role of voice over IP here is gluing people together no matter where they are.”

 

In his morning keynote address, the Avaya official joked that fame and fortune (why we’re all here) is likely to be found only by targeting specific services in any particular vertical that address those processes. In fact, the only way out of the chasm – a reference to Geoffrey A. Moore, the venture capitalist and noted author of books such as “Crossing the Chasm,” – is through a razor-sharp focus on any respective field.

 

The problem isn’t that communications hasn’t unified on a single platform. Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) has relied on IP for a while, he said. But using various case studies, Byrd illustrated how people by and large are the cause for latency in the overall business process much of the time.

 

“We have seen the problem and it is us,” Byrd mused, drawing chuckles from the audience.

 

That is the role of Web services. Instead of just building the applications for the sake of doing so, all of the underlying applications (call routing, conferencing, presence, etc.) must be extracted into communication Web services to compose services that address specific tasks of the overall business process.

 

“My communications becomes a set of resources to bring people together.”

 

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Robert Liu is Executive Editor at TMCnet. Previously, he was Executive Editor at Jupitermedia and has also written for CNN, A&E, Dow Jones and Bloomberg. For more articles, please visit Robert Liu's columnist page.