In a brief story in the back of its “Open Dialog” newsletter, Siemens Enterprise Communications’ analyst relations folks mention a “UC in the Cloud” proof of concept showcase at the company’s booth at VoiceCon 2009. Visitors will see how the Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) platform, which has been operated by Amazon.com for about three years now, can support a multiplicity of functions that are touted by the vendors of enterprise “unified communications” (UC) solutions. We would prefer to frame it as a “voice-in-the-cloud” offering because it adds intelligent call routing, message management and presence-based status indicators to multi-site, multi-vendor environments. Relying on Amazon Web Services means that the whole package is highly scalable and can be offered on a “pay-as-you-go” basis.

Siemens Enterprise Communications is a natural fit with the cloud-based solution because the OpenScape line of application software, including Xpressions UC bundle and the OpenScape voice applications, were designed from the beginning to work in multi-vendor environments. Building and testing applications that interoperate and inter-network with EC2 holds the promise of adding Amazon’s e-commerce resources, which include massive storage, database processing, queueing and transaction processing to the call-handling and voice processing workflows.

The Siemens/Amazon proof-of-concept is one of several voice in the cloud offerings that are pretty far along their path to market. Twilio, a software company that is “powered by Amazon Web Services,” is the most direct competitor. It positions itself as a software company that provides Web developers in a variety of verticals to developers in many verticals, including e-commerce and extending to healthcare, customer service, education, iPhone applications, games, social networking and many others, a way to add voice services to their offerings. Since they are not married to any hardware platform, they use an API that promotes development with high-level scripting languages and tools. They are also vendor agnostic. And, of course, Voxeo, with Tropo.com, also offers a way to move storage, media processing and application processing into remote resources.

All providers of Eclipse-based application development environments are moving in a direction that are indifferent to the location of various resources and the branding of the underlying platforms. We’ve been impressed at Amazon Web Services’ support of voice in the cloud. In spite of (or perhaps because of) the down economy, we expect to see cloud-based solutions help companies leverage their existing resources by employing high-speed wireless and wireline links to Internet-based resources. That’s how a growing set of Web developers will be able to introduce new phone-based applications, services and features with unprecedented speed at comparatively low costs.

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