Mark Ericson, director of SOA product strategy for BlueNote Networks, joins me for this week's podcast on the subject of VoIP/SOA convergence. When Mark talks about communications-enabling business processes, he doesn't just mean processes talking to one another, but also processes communicating with people -- and coordinating the communication among people. We've dreamed about unified communications forever, and for the most part we're still dreaming, but we'll get there one of these days. When we do, we'll wonder how we ever got along without the service-oriented integration of voice and data that BlueNote envisions.
Towards the end of our conversation we discuss Skype, and Mark suggests an interesting rationale for eBay's acquisition of it. As more and more high-value transactions flow through eBay, the level of trust between buyer and seller becomes increasingly critical. If you can recruit voice or video channels in the context of a transaction, you can strengthen that trust relationship. It's a great explanation that I hadn't heard before, and that I think is spot on.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/10/13.html#a1544