Yesterday I saw a presentation by Sphere Communications showing their product Sphericall, a service oriented PBX system.

The ideas in this software were really cool. The product is a software based IP PBX system which includes a SOAP based interface into the system, allowing you to completely integrate your VoIP network with your business applications.

The ideas presented in the presentation were pretty interesting. The product integrates phone, IM, and presence capabilities into its main desktop product, and also allows integration via web services to your business applications, allowing you to integrate your phone system into any application via a standards based interface.

Imagine being able to pop up customer information as soon as they dial in and being able to greet them by name and have their full history available to you right away via your CRM application. Imagine being able to put together conference calls by dragging and dropping people into your conference bridge when they call your office number. Now, image having IM like presence capabilities built into your phone system, so that you know whether someone is on the phone without having to call and be dumped into phone mail. These scenarios and many others were some of the things that Todd talked about during this presentation.

I thought the product looked extremely cool and shows a vision of corporate communication systems that is very compelling and exciting. The company has a whitepaper available on their web site (registration required).