The UCStrategies.com team has been having an interesting email thread discussion this past week about Communication Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) vis a vis Unified Communications. I wrote in a blog (http://blog.ucstrategies.com/?p=22) called Why Avaya is Differentiating CEBP from Unified Communications last week during the annual Avaya Analyst Conference about how Avaya distinguishes between CEBP and UC, which led to comments by several readers, as well as a discussion amongst our team.

While I am still opposed to Avaya classifying UC and Communication-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) separately, since it is my firm belief that business process integration is a key part of UC, I finally understand the distinction they’re making. The good folks at Avaya helped me understand why and how they are separating UC and CEBP. I don’t agree so much with the why, but I now understand the how.To Avaya, UC focuses on the personal productivity capabilities, helping individuals and teams better communicate and interact. CEBP is different, and Avaya notes, “Avaya CEBP continuously analyzes information from a wide range of sources, detects important events and then orchestrates and manages the organizational response by selecting the appropriate people and tools based on expertise and availability. People distributed across multiple locations and functional groups are automatically brought together by a robust multi-channel communications infrastructure — they can be contacted and provided information via voice, e-mail, SMS, text-to-speech and conferencing.” To Avaya, this is CEBP, but to me, this is UC.

I see the key differentiating point of Avaya’s CEBP from UC as coming down to who or what triggers the communication. My take on Avaya’s position is that while UC is generally person triggered (an individual or worker initiates the communication), CEBP is event triggered (a business process-related event initiates the communication). The event could be an inventory shortage, a stock price change by a specific percentage, a manufacturing malfunction, a shipment delay, etc. That’s fine, but isn’t the fact that the communication is being initiated and people can better interact and collaborate through a variety of means essentially what UC is all about? My main bone of contention is the segregation of business processes from UC.

The UCStrategies.com definition of Unified Communications is “Communications integrated to optimize business processes.” This definition essentially includes CEBP, as integration business processes are a key part of a UC solution.

As my colleague Don Van Doren pointed out, “What we at UCStrategies.com have been saying is the there are two UC zones:  personal productivity, and business process.  The personal productivity is generally triggered by the individual, and the business process zone will increasingly be triggered by the application itself.  ‘Increasingly,’ as application software becomes better at incorporating communications functionality, and as the suppliers start developing effective ways to make presence technology skills-based rather than people-based.”  Looking at it from this perspective, CEBP is certainly a part of UC. So why separate out CEBP from UC? Is it to distinguish oneself from competitors? Is it to lay claim to a market segment that others haven’t jumped on yet? I’m not sure what the rationale is, or whether or not it’s working. Many analysts and others have jumped on the CEBP bandwagon, so Avaya is doing a good job of promoting its message. But is it the right message? And as Marty Parker commented, why dissect the market and make each piece (UC and CEBP) separate? This fragments the market, serving no purpose.

So is CEBP part of UC or separate? It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that communications is integrated to optimize business processes, helping organizations resolve problems more quickly, satisfy customer needs more effectively, and run their businesses more efficiently.