Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has emerged as an enterprise IT trend in recent years based on a desire to reduce costs, complexity and duplicated effort when developing or integrating multiple applications that provide similar functionality. SOA achieves this by delivering common and re-usable application building blocks or “services” that can be customized to the needs of a particular line of business or functional area.

As Enterprise Communications providers have begun implementing more software-centric delivery approaches to replace traditional proprietary PBX  boxes, several vendors such as Siemens and Avaya have launched initiatives to enable specific features of their communication software to be accessible through SOA-based business applications — a capability frequently referred to as “Communication Enabled Business Process” or CEBP.