February 11th, 2008
Can Microsoft Mash SOA and UC?
The New York Times article about PopFly, Microsoft’s mashup maker, got me thinking about how Microsoft will use mashups and SOA with unified communications (UC). I asked Eric Swift, Microsoft’s senior director of Unified Communications, as much two weeks ago when we met in Redmond
First some background. There’s a growing trend amongst enterprise communications vendors to enable their communications servers to be controlled through a Web Service architecture. This would allow a PopFly-like product, for example, to mashup stock alert and a voice response system so in the event that company’s stock fell beneath a pre-defined threshold, an executive attending the 3GSM conference could receive an SMS on the phone and then be brought into a conference call right form his/her mobile. Alternatively, a laptop user at the same 3GSM conference could receive an IM and click on an embedded link to be brought into a conference call. Avaya, BlueNote, NEC through its Sphere acquisition, and Siemens have delivered products in this area dubbed Communication Enabled Business Process (CEBP). Nortel announced a SOA play in the fall of last year.
Of course, this is only possible if the players have their communications platforms in place and that platform must be able to support at the very least voice , presence and to a large extent IM. Microsoft, of course, delivered as much last October when it released Office Communications Server (OCS). At the same time, Microsoft made this huge Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) splash in the same time frame, announcing it Oslo strategy, which provides the foundation for its SOA platform.
Absent in this whole discussion though is the intersection of OCS and SOA. So I asked Swift about this disconnect between talking SOA, but not lacking those interface into OCS. He pointed to the numerous APIs that developers already have into OCS and how they can build on those interfaces to create speech-enabled applications, for example.
But that’s not the same as providing a SOA interface and Swift knows it. If architects are going to embed the capabilities of OCS within their business processes then they’ll need simpler interfaces than what’s available with OCS today. They just can’t be expected to learn the intricacies of establishing a voice connection. Microsoft needs to offer them a high-level interface if OCS is going to extend into business process.
David Greenfield is the principal in STAnalytics. a global technology-marketing consultancy where he advises enterprises on emerging technologies. See David Greenfield's full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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