Siemens Delivers First SOA-Based Telephony Apps

Siemens Communications this week detailed a new service-oriented architecture and delivered its first two SOA-based apps leveraging its SIP-based softswitch.

SOA is all the rage in the applications and development world--but it holds great promise for the creation of more flexible telephony-based applications as well. Siemens calls its application architecture OpenSOA; its new apps--HiPath 8000 Assistant and HiPath 8000 Media Server--leverage that foundation to ease integration with other apps and increase portability across different servers and operating systems, Siemens said.Siemens said OpenSOA also delivers baseline service component capabilities--including presence, location, notification and collaboration capabilities--that enterprises can use to build new composite telephony apps in such areas as unified communications, unified message and call centers. OpenSOA components are built in Java and XML and leverage industry standard SOA interfaces, the vendor said.

OpenSOA has already been demonstrated to work with SAP's NetWeaver application middleware. Next up is integration with IBM's Lotus Sametime messaging environment.