And in the other corner, weighing eight hundred pounds, the Avaya avenger, the King of the Ring, the Communications Enabled Business Process.

You might be aware of Avaya’s Communication Enabled Business Process. If you are not, it’s Avaya’s response to the need for every enterprise to integrate real time communications into the business process. Rich Tehrani also had a good post about this, and Forrester has a new report dedicated to the topic. The Lippis Report has an excellent post on it:

CEBP, by definition is a custom project. There are business process modeling consulting organizations, which are today’s efficiency engineers, working through business process to save an organization time and money. But CEBP promises to be much more; it promises to deliver a new kind of agile and competitive organization that can respond to business events quickly, satisfy customers more deeply, and in the process create competitive barriers of entry. There are tremendous opportunities for companies who analyze innovative communications technology like CEBP as it presents a new paradigm for business communications. CEBP promises to contribute to better corporate decision making by inserting human decision making at the right time with the right people and providing the right context to decision makers through multi-channel communications.

You might be wondering what the differences are between CEBP and Voice Mashups, and as near as I can tell, they are :

• Voice Mashups and CEBP solutions seek to solve the exact same problem. When you integrate real time communications into the business process, you make the business run faster, with less resources and with happier customers. Both Voice Mashups and CEBP answer this need.
• Voice Mashups tends to be a lighter weight approach, and CEBP tends to be heavier weight.
• A voice mashup will tend to extend a current implementation using web services and pay-as-you go software. CEBP solutions tend to involve big iron, big investment and big vendors.
• Voice mashups can be projects that cost less than a week’s worth of an engineer’s time to develop and deploy. CEBP solutions can have six figure solutions.
• Voice Mashups tend to integrate with exteneral web services in addition to telephony services such as data validation or Google Maps.
• CEBP solutions come from proprietary vendors. Voice Mashups tend to be open source and open standard driven.
• CEBP solutions tend to still be centered on voice “old think” (Bigger and better voice applications. Unified Communications solutions come to mind.) Voice Mashups tend to be centered on using voice “new think” (using voice to extend existing applications).
• CEBP solutions come from guys who wear ties to the beach. The voice mashup guys are very sexy. (Obviously.)

I’m quite happy to see such a push from large vendors on the problem my company is trying to solve. It’s validation that the problem exists (it does), and that businesses will invest money in this area (they will). The question is, when do you choose CEBP solutions, and when do you choose VoIP mashup solutions?

• Choose voice mashups when you wish to minimize risk, costs and maximize leverage from your existing infrastructure.
• Choose CEBP solutions when you are investing into the next generation of communications equipment for your Fortune 500 or large government, and your relationship to your existing big vendor is essential for your success.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 9:38 pm | Filed Under Lead Stories |

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