Unified communications meets business process automation

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 15 July 2009 07:22

IT Industry - Strategy

IDG conducted an online survey (it is not clear whether Interactive Intelligence commissioned the survey) and says: "the results of this online survey tell a tale of big payback, especially when it comes to integrating communications within process automation. The findings conclude that: the value of BPA lies in minimising latency and human error; the primary barriers to BPA are the costs and complexity associated with legacy offerings; communications-based approach to BPA is a key to maximizing RoI."

According to IDG, "The results clearly demonstrate that leveraging communication technology as the basis for process automation can enable enterprises to maximise BPA value. The majority of respondents (87 percent) acknowledge the inherent connection between unified communications and BPA. What's more, 50 percent see where communication technology could be used to automate business processes."

If IDG and Interactive Intelligence are on the right track we could well see other major vendors quickly jumping on the bandwagon. Several are claiming that they are "communications enabling business processes".

Las October Cisco announced its plans to grab a major share of what it identifed as a multibillion collaboration market.   Cisco explained that its new collaboration portfolio had been designed to "interoperate with business applications, communications devices and Web-based tools."

Cisco was already a year behind Avaya in promoting this vision. The latter had unveiled, in mid 2007, Avaya Communications Enabled Business Processes, describing these as "enhancing operational efficiency, worker productivity and customer satisfaction by streamlining human engagement in critical business processes [with] solutions that integrate with business process applications to predict and sense events, then respond by managing real-time multi-channel communication with process users and decision-makers."

The then head of Avaya South Pacific, Carlton Taya described it as "how we bring together the communications applications from Avaya with the business applications our customers already run. For example a large manufacturer might want to lock in his inventory management system with his communications system so that, whenever he has an inventory fall the appropriate people can be automatically and immediately alerted."

This sounds remarkably similar to the vision that Interactive Intelligence is promoting, but without quite the same emphasis on the automation of the business processes themselves.

In a similar vein, Nortel last year revealed its Agile Communication Environment, a set of software tools claimed to enable unified communications to be added to any business application. Nortel claims that: "The key value of the solution is that it enables human-latency to be removed from the communications process, speeding the decision cycle and improving response times which provide critical competitive differentiation for companies."