By Jon Udell

Voice and data networking remain two different cultures that have so far failed spectacularly to come together. But I’m stubbornly optimistic that, sooner or later, they will. There are too many opportunities to ignore, and those opportunities multiply as service orientation takes hold.

Consider a business process that’s been automated, SOA-style. A BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) script orchestrates the flow of XML payloads through a sequence of steps, untouched by human hands, until an exception occurs. In all such workflows, people are the exception handlers of last resort. Story continues