Joe on Communications as a Service (CaaS)

A great article by my teammate, Joseph Hofstader, was posted to the MSDN Architecture Center called "Communications as a Service."  He details how the concept of CaaS builds upon the architectural issues that arise when dealing with SaaS, and details how the communications concept compounds the multi-tenant issues.  It's a great read, highly recommended if you want a peek into the future of communications.

This was particularly interesting to me given the recent announcement of SharePoint and Exchange hosted online through Microsoft Online Services. 

Something I have been playing with recently is BT's Web21c SDK.  The premise sounds simple enough, but it is somewhat staggering to look at the architecture behind some of the major telcos and picture this type of SDK actually seeing the light of day.  And BT did an incredible job with it... go check out the Channel9 interview with the Web21c developers to see how cool this SDK is.

Communications as a Service... incredibly cool to think of the possibilities here.  Beyond Skype, beyond MSN Messenger voice calls, beyond restricting yourself to thinking in terms of voice telephone calls.