I have to second Sheila's comments about Aspect's acquisition of Blue Note. The folks behind Blue Note were some of the sharpest people around when it came to leveraging Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) for communications, and Blue Note's Fergal Glynn spoke on this topic at VoiceCon from the time we first started scheduling it as a session. I was kind of expecting that Blue Note would eventually get snapped up by one of the big platform vendors, though upon closer examination this wasn't so likely. Like Sheila, I think Blue Note brings some pizzazz to the industry as a whole, and their position in any acquisition was likely to be comparable to the role Sphere assumed when it was gobbled up by NEC last year: Cutting edge, SOA-based technology with the potential to start moving a legacy vendor to a new level in a single stroke.
I have to second Sheila's comments about Aspect's acquisition of Blue Note. The folks behind Blue Note were some of the sharpest people around when it came to leveraging Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) for communications, and Blue Note's Fergal Glynn spoke on this topic at VoiceCon from the time we first started scheduling it as a session. I was kind of expecting that Blue Note would eventually get snapped up by one of the big platform vendors, though upon closer examination this wasn't so likely. Like Sheila, I think Blue Note brings some pizzazz to the industry as a whole, and their position in any acquisition was likely to be comparable to the role Sphere assumed when it was gobbled up by NEC last year: Cutting edge, SOA-based technology with the potential to start moving a legacy vendor to a new level in a single stroke.I also agree with Sheila's notion that Blue Note's value is the toolkit it provides, and the example Sheila gives of a quick, Blue Note-powered development project resonates with an experiment we tried in one of the VoiceCon sessions: Fergal Glynn of Blue Note built an application on the fly, right there in the session.
So why didn't Blue Note get snapped up by one of the platform guys? Actually, there weren't as many prospective buyers as you might think. Avaya is well along the road on its home-grown CEBP initiative; Cisco's CEBP strategy would have to be bound up in its larger SONA initiative as it tries to meld the application and network layer across its range of products beyond just voice; Nortel has a partnership with IBM for SOA; NEC made its move with Sphere; Siemens is the prey, not the hunter.
So that left players like Aspect. Their partnership with Microsoft, announced at VoiceCon Orlando 2008, positioned them clearly at the intersection of Unified Communications and contact centers, so the Blue Note acquisition shows they're moving aggressively to make this integration more than just a slogan.
