For years, decades even, we have been anticipating the convergence of computing and telecommunications. People talked about it in the 1970s. Nevertheless, it began in earnest much later—in about 1994 when the Internet, catching everyone by surprise, sprang into action and connected all the computers together.

You could claim that the Internet was the convergence of computing and telecomms, because all those millions of computers were talking over telecomms lines. But actually it wasn’t. Telephony and computing stayed as far apart as ever. No-one went to their computer to make a telephone call until, well,… until VoIP, which for most people meant Skype and for most companies didn’t. But even with VoIP proliferating (as it now is) we still haven’t achieved the integration of communications and computing. We achieved the ability for a phone to have an IP address and a computer to become a virtual phone.

Avaya and Telecomms Integration

I was given a glimpse of what the integration of telecomms and computing meant at the Avaya analyst conference I attended in November 2006. Avaya are making a good deal of noise about SOA. (I guess I should declare an interest here, because I have one—Avaya has bought and distributed some copies of a SOA for Dummies minibook—written by myself and others).

Avaya, if you didn’t know, is the corporate networking spinoff from Lucent, that cacme into existence in 2000 just as the dot com and telco decline began. It had humbling beginnings, as its share price tanked and its revenues declined, but in time it stabilized and then started to grow. From a product perspective it has 4 groups of products; IP telephony products, call center products, audio conferencing products and unified messaging products (products which manage SMS, voice, email et al).

One of the things that is interesting about Avaya is that it is “going soft”, by gradually transforming itself from a physical products vendor into a software vendor (it’s not doing this across the board, of course, but only where it makes sense). And as part of this transformation—and make no mistake, it is a transformation and not a painless one either—Avaya has exposed a good deal of its software capabilities as Web Services.

Initially my impression was that Avaya had done nothing more than that, and right now technically, it may not have done, but there is no doubt that the senior technical staff in Avaya have more than web services in mind.

A SOA Messaging Platform

Here’s the point: In a Service Oriented Architecture that spans the enterprise, there is going to be a need for a “messaging platform”. I’m not talking about an ESB, by the way, which could be described in this way, and is likely to be necessary too. An ESB is about managing message delivery from software component to software component. I’m talking about a software platform and its supporting infrastructure that manages message delivery (intelligently) from person to person or software component to person or person to software component. Super-duper-unified messaging.

As I see it, this is what Avaya is seeking to deliver and this is why it is so interested in SOA. It isn’t just another company that wants to mix SOA into its marketing message, it’s a company with a definite technical mission.

And if it succeeds (or even merely provokes one of its competitors into succeeding in this area) then we will finally have the convergence of telecomms and computing. The network is the computer, and the communication system too and you wont be able to tell one from the other.

Oh, and there will be business benefits.

This is a posting in the Telephony/Communications Integration series of Focus postings.