As companies continue the pursuit of reaping the cost savings and productivity enhancements offered by integrating real-time voice traffic over the corporate Wide Area Network (WAN), unified communications (UC) has found an unlikely ally: service-oriented architecture (SOA).

Traditionally, application development is a slow-moving process: businesses recognize the functionality they need within their infrastructures and request that IT departments develop an application that addresses the need. Before SOA, in the time it would take IT to develop, test, and train staff on the solution, the issue had often times evolved or changed to the point where the applications needed to be modified – or worse – scrapped altogether. The allure of SOA is that it enables administrators to re-use code and thereby not re-create the wheel every time a ticket comes in. The end result is a drastic reduction in the amount of time it takes to develop and deliver applications while enabling companies to link services in new and innovative ways.

What does this have to do with UC? For years, telephony was relegated to PBX systems that ran off the WAN, frequently on proprietary software. In order to create business applications that support phone and data interoperability, development staff needed to have a deep understanding of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) technology, as well as the proprietary infrastructure involved. Because this type of specialized knowledge was not often available, enterprises kept their communications traffic off the WAN and experienced disjointed “islands of communication” that prevented real-time applications from being integrated into business applications. This is where SOA comes to the rescue.

Instead of relying on a VoIP genius among their ranks, companies can develop simple Web services for common telephony-related tasks and then refine them based on experience. For instance, an application that is used to retrieve customer contact information could be programmed to not only show the data, but also initiate a phone call or an instant message session to that person. One of the most important examples of a converged application available on the market today is Microsoft’s Office Communications Server (OCS) along with its client application, Office Communicator.

From the end user’s perspective, OCS and Office Communicator provide fully integrated support for presence-based instant messaging, file transfer, white-boarding and application sharing, as well as real-time audio and video communication. Even more important, OCS supports integration with other Microsoft Office applications such as Outlook (email), Word (word processing), Excel (spreadsheet), PowerPoint (presentation graphics), and others, effectively “communications-enabling” these desktop productivity applications. This integration proves useful when, for example, an end user receives an email message from a contact. The end user can see the contact’s real-time presence (availability) status and initiate an IM chat or audio call with the contact – all from within Outlook. SOA is creating new opportunities for UC by enabling new business process integration between voice and data networks that turn common tasks into reusable Web services applications to improve workflow and general business practices.

By embracing the SOA approach to UC, enterprises open themselves to the benefits of communication-enabled applications while simplifying the process needed to create them, making the process easy for developers. By committing to an IT strategy that utilizes both SOA’s interoperability standards and UC’s myriad uses, enterprises can secure, route, control, or monitor any real-time session and reduce the costs and complexity of deployment ordinarily associated with these projects. Freedom from the burden of having to learn complex policy models or write code for individual applications creates a win-win situation that allows developers to align IT strategy and execution with management vision quickly and effectively.