Avaya customers in the U.S. will have access to Skype Connect and Skype users can make inbound calls to Avaya customers in the U.S. for free or at a low cost. Calls will be treated with Avaya’s routing, conferencing, messaging, mobility and contact center capabilities, as well as other collaboration services. 

“Avaya and Skype have been working along parallel paths to offer, innovative, scalable, low cost, SIP-based communications to our respective markets,” said Alan Baratz, senior vice president, Avaya and president, Avaya Global Communications Solutions. “Now, the two companies will work together, striving to improve collaboration and customer service by federating Avaya and Skype solutions for a common user experience that delivers unique benefits for businesses and their customers who are Skype users.”

“Our relationship with Avaya is expected to expand the footprint for Skype Connect into more enterprises in the U.S. market, while allowing us to help Avaya’s customers benefit from Skype’s cost savings and access to Skype’s global user base,” said David Gurlé, vice president and general manager of Skype for Business. “We believe our integrated solution in the second half of 2011 is expected to offer the benefits of Skype to a growing number of businesses and open up new ways for people to communicate and collaborate.”

It is also rumored that Skype is preparing a deal with Facebook.

Avaya deals in “communications systems, applications, and services,” according to its website, and a couple of headers like “IP Telephony” and “Mobility” give an even more specific idea of what the company’s all about. And Avaya is, by all appearances, adding Google to its list of top priorities.

Geoffrey Baird, who has an extremely long title (“vice president and general manager, Appliances, Mobility and Small Systems Division, Avaya”), discussed the new arrangement. “Avaya is working with Google to accelerate the convergence of enterprise communications with Web services,” he said.

Then Baird took a moment to pat his company’s new friend on the back. “Google Apps Premier Edition offers a powerful set of APIs that enable us to create new solutions that can help small businesses make dramatic improvements in employee productivity and get more out of their communications investment – making both Web and communications content available over a PC, phone or mobile device.”

As excited as the Google and Avaya reps were, though, they weren’t on their own (which is to say, what the companies are doing has some merit, and isn’t just a business maneuver). Om Malik, while writing about the deal, described “marrying voice with IM, email, and presence applications” as “[t]he holy grail of integrated communications . . . a yet-unrealized promise . . . .”

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Avaya and SAP plan to offer a combined solution, mySAP CRM with Avaya Interaction Center software, the firms announced in a statement. The companies believe the routing capabilities in Avaya’s solution can draw from the “context of information from mySAP” about a customer and direct him or her to the correct business associate.

Promotional efforts begin at VoiceCon in Orlando, March 6-9, 2006. After that, the companies should make the combined solution available to customers in the second quarter of ’06.

The pair touted the support of a Services Oriented Architecture with the new combo. By building on open industry standards, developers at both SAP and Avaya were able to create that interactivity without having to learn each other’s proprietary code.

Proprietary messaging schemes are experiencing the effect of a whispering campaign against them, from a higher-level perspective. The well-moneyed financial industry has been discussing the prospect of embracing AMQ, an open-source recreation of IBM’s WebSphere MQ.

JPMorgan Chase and Co VP John Davies discussed the project at the Web Services on Wall Street conference in February 2005, eWeek reported. Although Davies isn’t listed on this year’s conference, a session on a JPMorgan Chase case study with an unnamed JP Morgan Chase speaker is present.

Last year, Davies told eWeek that banks need something that is not proprietary. Perhaps the Avaya-SAP collaboration using open standards is a way for those organizations to stave off potential competition from a developed AMQ product.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.