David Greenfield wrote an excellent report discussing SOA and UC convergence. His article also blends CEBP under the UC umbrella. He does a great job reviewing many of the major platform players and their approaches to the marketplace.
However, this paragraph caught my attention and flew in the face of our own client experiences .
” Communications- enabled apps come in an out of fashion every few years. What’s new this time is the SOA approach. Making UC just another service within the SOA environment keeps apps flexible and dynamic. We believe UC can help individuals collaborate more effectively, but proving ROI is difficult.”
To be fair, the article does point out that most of the platform apis handle web services. It does not stress how important that new capacity is for end users, the IT department, and for the enterprise as a whole. It is the yeast that makes the bread.
Our experience helping enterprise clients think through, develop, and deploy real projects clearly shows ROI can absolutely be the driving factor when deciding how/where/when to deploy these types of solutions. Yes, it is true, rather simple sounding mashups that blend in data or smooth out business processes may become the secret sauce behind a successful CEBP implementation. Simplicity is OK with most clients. They seem to like the fact that helping them improve customer experiences, save, and make money is at the root of these solutions.
As we have discussed over and over again, the real value to clients when discussing CEBP is that it is NOT a one size fits all solution. Clients quickly realize these offerings (whether platform or hosted) provide dozens and hundreds of unique opportunities to impact their business processes, customers, and staff positively.