The convergence of information technology and telephony (among other multimedia applications), has forced both telephony service providers and IT providers, such as Microsoft, to work both sides of the technology fence for the greater benefit of their customers, who demand that suppliers keep pace with customer needs. You're a Microsoft .NET developer, and you've been tasked with integrating telephony functionality with your company's .NET applications. You don't know where to start.

To compete in the telephony service space with bundled services, enterprise application providers must rely upon a distributed application infrastructure. And this distributed application environment demands new tools and new functionality to manage it.

To answer that call, Microsoft's partner Inova IT, with its SIP Objects.NET and SIP Servlets.NET solutions, has teamed up with Avaya to provide a seamless framework for developing and deploying .NET applications that incorporate telephony functionality.

Let's explore these new tools that are available to help you as a .NET developer break into the telephony space to provide bundled services and converged applications to your customers. In part two of this series, we'll delve into the infrastructure you'll need to deploy and manage these converged applications and bundled services.

Making the Team
Avaya's Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) developer audience, as a traditionally Java and Eclipse user base, has reaped the benefits of SIP development through the various plug-ins to the Eclipse platform provided by Avaya to enable easy and seamless SIP development. Recognizing the large .NET developer audience and Microsoft's emergence into the service provider space, Avaya has teamed with Inova IT to provide the missing link between .NET development and computer telephony/SIP development. Inova IT, as specialists in .NET and Microsoft toolsets, works in conjunction with Avaya's expertise and solutions that interwork and interact with Microsoft systems in the operator and service provider arena.

Now, .NET developers can use the Visual Studio development environment along with Inova IT's SIP Objects.NET framework, SIP Servlets.NET framework and Avaya's SIP Application Server (A/S) Gateway for Connected Services Framework (CSF) to create converged applications. CSF is the Microsoft environment for telecom operators to deploy new services in. The gateway is needed to adapt the Open Web Services (OWS) APIs of Avaya into the CSF. We'll talk more about CFS and the SIP A/S Gateway in the next article.

The Inova IT and Avaya team brings Microsoft knowledge to the computer/telephone integration area, as Microsoft's development tools traditionally have not included the tools and framework to provide access to telephony facilities. The focus is on providing those services, such as telephony, to .NET developers through the SIP Objects.NET and SIP Servlets.NET development frameworks to develop and provide access to services provided by Avaya's SIP A/S.