In its latest report discussing the “true business value” of communications-enabled business processes (CEBP), Ovum says that in the current operating environment IT is under pressure to combine existing resources and infrastructure with emerging technologies to deliver the desired functionality in the most cost-effective and time-efficient manner.
According to Ovum senior analyst and author of the report, Saurabh Sharma, the rapid proliferation of mobility solutions is creating “complex integration issues that need new solutions.”
Sharma points out that lightweight mobile middleware is gaining ground as a suitable approach for integration of mobility solutions with enterprise IT systems and business process, and he says communications enablement can reduce the latency associated with human involvement in business processes and provide “many benefits such as more efficient resource utilisation, faster time-to-value, and more effective collaboration, both within and between enterprises.”
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Ovum observes that many CEBP development platforms are highly proprietary and do not provide all the necessary tools and interfaces to ease the complexity of communications and business process integration.
And, Sharma says that customisation work done by system integrators (SIs) to enable the integration of communications services with specific business processes adds to the total cost of ownership (TCO) of unified communications and collaboration (UCC) solutions and, “for this reason, is not a sustainable approach in the long run.”
Sharma cautions that CEBP development should not be approached as a one-off project.
Instead, he says organisations should develop a strategy and roadmap, and prioritise business processes for communications enablement based on their business value.
“Organisations should focus on leveraging existing integration architecture for the development of CEBPs and to enable integration between disparate applications. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and event-driven architecture (EDA) are architectural prerequisites for CEBPs.”
The review of the market by Ovum, found that CEBP development platforms offered by different UCC vendors vary in terms of approach to communications enablement of business processes and applications, with UCC vendors such as Avaya and Alcatel-Lucent offering open standards based APIs and SDKs for the development of CEBPs.
Sharma says that other vendors such as IBM and Microsoft are using their UCC suites to add communications functionality to business processes and applications, and a few vendors, such as IBM and Software AG, facilitate communications and business process integration via their business process management (BPM) suites.
“Then there are CEBP solutions that cater for specific requirements such as interactive voice response (IVR), automated call distribution (ACD), closed-loop notification services, and workload management.”
Sharma warns that interoperability and integration remain a major barrier to CEBP adoption as only a few CEBP development platforms support a wide range of open standards and protocols such as “session initiation protocol (SIP), voice extensible mark-up language (VoiceXML), asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax), web services description language (WSDL), and extensible messaging and presence protocol (XMPP).”
