Earlier this week, Ken and I had a chance to sit down on Skype and have a conversation about Jaduka and our mission.  Ken is an excellent interviewer, and I’m really honored that he took the time to sit down with me – especially considering the star power of the other people he and Sheryl have been speaking to lately.   Ken is one of the true visionaries for unified communications, an excellent blogger, and fast becoming the go-to guy for social media applications.   For me – he’s a must read.  Have a listen.

I’m hearing this more and more from people: why isn’t communications enabled business process (CEBP) the same thing as Unified Communications(UC)?

In short, it’s about focus.  If you look at any demonstration of UC from Microsoft, Cisco or Seimmens, you notice right away that they are focusing on the person. They are handling phone calls, promoting chat sessions to voice calls, viewing the presence and online status of their co-workers, etc.  UC seeks to make the person more productive, and provides easy ways for the person to handle increasingly complex communications situations. (Almost makes you wonder if they are making communications more complex in order to sell you ways to make it less complex.)   This is all important stuff, but it’s not CEBP.

CEBP focuses on making the business process more effective using voice.  The classic example is late payment notifications delivered over a phone.  Every day, the CRM runs through the list of late accounts, and then sends a voice message to the offending customers reminding them to send a check in.  In this case, there’s no call for an employee to handle – the system makes the call. There’s no online status to check – the recipient of the call is outside the walls.  The star of CEBP is other pieces of application software.

Is this just a semantic argument? Couldn’t the UC guys just jigger something up for the same functionality?  Well, I’m sure they will, but I doubt they’ll be long term successful, because there’s just too many fundamental differences:

• UC is an application in and of itself; CEBP exists to make other applications better.
• The primary UC control interface is presented to the user in the form of web pages and clients; the primary CEBP control interface is an API.
• UC solutions contain value in the complexity they handle in call flows, status and such; CEBP solutions contain value in how easy they are to integrate with other applications.
• UC solutions assume that they are the star of the show, and if not – it’s the user; CEBP solutions assume that the application they are enhancing is the star.

You can call that rock a dog all you want, but don’t expect it to go fetch your slippers.  Even though Unified Communications has become the catch all term for all things Enterprise communications related, its’ not CEBP.

DALLAS (March 31, 2009) — Jaduka, a Web Services company providing on-demand customer communications services, has launched Jaduka Voice Notification—the latest addition to its suite of offerings targeting business process optimization for enterprise customers.  This innovative service uses email to trigger a voice notification to any phone for applications such as payment reminders or delivery coordination.  By using email as the interface, enterprise developers can quickly and effortlessly integrate voice into legacy applications.  By lowering integration costs, system integrators can voice-enable nearly any legacy application to reduce missed appointments, collect payments faster and optimize the business process with real-time communications.  The service is available immediately to Jaduka partners.

“Email is the universal interface to legacy enterprise applications,” said Jaduka CEO Thomas Howe. “Our mission is to extend current applications using voice, and we couldn’t think of a simpler way to allow our customers to do that.  With this service, integration is as easy as sending an email.”

The service uses email to trigger voice messages through Text-to-Speech or wav/mp3 files to recipients’ phones.  In addition, it provides system integrators with a powerful analytics and account provisioning interface, allowing them to resell the service to their customers.  The service is integrated with the top email clients, and works seamlessly with all of the major enterprise software frameworks.

For enterprises seeking to improve response times, Jaduka Voice Notification is easy to use, quick to deploy and gives professionals a superior way to notify large groups within short time frames, such as alerting an internal department of a breaking development or a customer group in the case of an emergency.  As with all Jaduka services, Voice Notification requires zero capital expenditures and offers frictionless integration and pay-as-you-go billing options. For more information, please visit www.jaduka.com.

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About Jaduka:
Jaduka On-Demand Customer Communications Services target business process optimization by blending real-time communications into critical workflows. Delivered over the Web, our time-sensitive notifications, event-triggered alerts, ad-hoc conferencing functionality and Web site call support help companies increase sales, decrease response times and reduce operating costs across the enterprise.

Jaduka offers frictionless integration, pay-as-you-go billing and zero capital expenditures. Accessed by companies a million times daily, the Jaduka API supports over 1 billion accounts. For more information, please visit: www.Jaduka.com.