Special report: As the acronyms (and the technologies they stand for) SOA and VoIP collide IT gets a new, advanced generation of communications that are part and parcel of the Web services era. That means that “telephony services such as presence, click-to-call, call routing, and Web conferencing can be combined with other communications and data services to create innovative new composite apps and services that can be recombined and reused to create still other new apps and services,” writes Leon Erlanger in SOA finds its VoIP. The package also includes a case study on application service provider The Hudson Group, which integrated voice with its Web infrastructure and order entry systems. Best of the blogs: As the SOA business continues maturing, Dave Linthicum spots these patterns distinguishing the good vendors from the bad. The first is the ability to be self-critical. And it doesn’t hurt to know when to walk away from a deal, either. Gripe Line: Dell gets a failing grade in school. And, no, this one is not about exploding batteries. “One out of six desktops failing within the first month certainly seems like a rate few schools would be happy with. What really upsets the reader though is the long periods of time it takes to get each system fixed, particularly when he feels Dell should just replace them with new systems that work,” Ed Foster reports. The news beat: Microsoft denies allegations by BayStar Capital that it promised to guarantee the firm’s $50 million investment in SCO. Iona unwraps version 4.1 of its Artix ESB, which brings new orchestration functionality and is integrated with AmberPoint’s SOA management platform. And Sun Microsystems teams up with Laszlo Systems to enable developers using the OpenLaszlo platform to write applications for J2ME mobile devices. Technology Industry