Service Oriented Communications (SOC): Integrating Human Capital with Business Processes

It's the new business mantra: Contain expenses without compromising value. As enterprises struggle with tough economic conditions by slashing capital expense budgets, new and more economical solutions become even more valuable. What many do not realize is that communications, an essential component across all enterprises, can be tailored to run efficiently within business processes.   

Enterprises over the past few years have invested heavily into Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) initiatives. Service Oriented Communications (SOC) is one way to effectively monetize the investment.  

SOC fully integrates human capital with business processes, business applications and Service Oriented Architecture. SOC is based on the premise that SOA applications can use a common "communications services engine" via web services -- including voice, email, conferencing, video, instant messaging and more -- within workflows of key business applications. SOC leverages the investments of SOA by integrating communications as a key application strategy. This allows for the integration of Unified Communications (UC) at a fraction of the investment compared to legacy systems. 

Alan Weir is the CTO of NEC Sphere Communications, the developer of NEC Sphericall. The award-winning solution is relied upon by all types of enterprises throughout the world including educational institutions, government agencies and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). NEC Sphericall runs on industry-standard servers across an existing data network. Through its unique distributed software architecture, Sphericall scales to 30,000 ports and achieves 99.999% reliability.