The Long, Long Road to CEBP

The theme of communications-enabled business processes has generated a lot of recent discussion among my fellow bloggers. Blair Pleasant explores the differences between the individual-initiated communications sessions of unified communications and event-initiated comms sessions of CEBP implementations. Irwin Lazar pokes a bit of fun at PBX vendors whose bread and butter come from sales of much the same sort of voice systems they've always sold, but whose marketing presents their firms as selling business transformation, business process improvement, SOA environments ... anything but PBXs.

The theme of communications-enabled business processes has generated a lot of recent discussion among my fellow bloggers. Blair Pleasant explores the differences between the individual-initiated communications sessions of unified communications and event-initiated comms sessions of CEBP implementations. Irwin Lazar pokes a bit of fun at PBX vendors whose bread and butter come from sales of much the same sort of voice systems they've always sold, but whose marketing presents their firms as selling business transformation, business process improvement, SOA environments ... anything but PBXs.Sheila McGee-Smith relays the progress report Avaya recently provided on its CEBP initiatives. And Melanie Turek sheds some light on why Avaya is suddenly talking about CEBP almost exclusively in terms of customer support. ("Avaya is aggressively seeding its CEBP sales team with business experts," she writes, "Many of whom come from the contact center, where reducing latency and improving processes is par for the course ...")

If you're in the market for a new phone system (or preparing to upgrade an existing one) and are not familiar with CEBP, don't sweat it too much at this point. This is really forward-thinking stuff. Nortel is still putting the finishing touches on the foundation environment SOA software that will communications-enable business applications that would otherwise have no communications capabilities inherent to them. And as far as I can tell Avaya's much ballyhooed CEBP initiative has resulted in only a handful of trials over the past year. My point is that the software, architectures, and services that will make CEBP a reality are by and large in their formative stages. Identifying what business software can in fact benefit from communications enablement and then making the necessary technical and business process changes will be a long term process for your organization. You should begin familiarizing yourself with the concepts involved in the communications enablement of business applications, but don't feel left out if your company is not on the bleeding edge of this particular market trend.

As an aside, it's worth noting that not all CEBP initiatives are created equal. I recently came across the acronym bandied about by a VoIP systems developer I never heard talk about it before. I started asking questions and it seems that to these guys CEBP is the new way they are describing integration between their IP PBX and various third-party customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning applications. So it looks like we may have to start duking it out over definitions to come to a consensus about what CEBP really means.