Today a couple of leaders in the telecom infrastructure market past and future announced new products designed to encourage development of new telecom applications in business enterprises. Skype, prodded by the introduction of Google Voice, has accelerated the “beta” test of “Skype for SIP” (referring to the “session initiation protocol” that underlies virtually all Voice over IP-based services). The idea is for companies that have invested in VoIP phones and IP-telephony switches to use Skype as their VoIP carrier without having to involve software running on a PC in the mix.

On the same day, in anticipation of the VoiceCon Conference in Orlando, Siemens Enterprise Communications, the division of the giant German conglomerate that markets telephones and IP-telephony switches made some major announcements regarding the roll-out of new software and services to accelerate the roll-out of new telephone-based services that leverage Web-based infrastructure and programming logic. The new Siemens OpenScale Professional Services and Integration Solutions Suite integrate with the OpenScape Unified Communications Application to deliver what Siemens refers to as “rich communications-enabled business processes (CEBP).”

Siemens has a lot of moving parts to its solution set. OpenScape is one of the longest standing SOA-conformant call processing suites in the market and Siemen’s survival strategy has long hinged on deep integration of its call processing resources in multivendor, heterogeneous environments. Hence the need for OpenScale Professional Services to knit things together. Its objective is to take the pain (but perhaps not the expense) out of integration of its UC suite (OpenScape) with middleware and IT infrastructure from Microsoft, IBM and Cisco, among others. It supports instant messaging through an integration of Openfire , an open source XMPP-conformant software platform and it offers a “fixed price” toolkit under the name OpenScape UC Integration Accessories to put the application development and integration resources in the hands of developers.

Compared to this very deep offering, eBay’s Skype is trying garner new revenues, ironically, by providing easier access to its resources for free or very inexpensive calling plans. For a deeper analysis of what’s in Skype for SIP, as well as a discussion of what’s been left out (like free outbound calling to other Skype numbers) Voxeo’s Dan York has written this excellent blog post based on a pre-briefing. My own sense is that we are witnessing the slow, inexorable Webification of the telephone and that it will be driven more by the introduction of useful features, functions and value propositions than a near-religious commitment to “unified communications”.

In other words, I’d rather be eBay telling the tens of millions of Skype business customers that they can have calls “local” numbers from around the world routed into their IP-PBX than Siemens justifying how the professional services organization can use a new toolkit to have your IP-PBX interoperate better with Microsoft, Cisco or IBM. At least two of those companies aim to make PBXs obsolete.

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