When it comes to voice over IP there is a natural tendency to turn to the existing voice technology experts to implement VOIP because there is a lot that can go wrong because a lot of the existing PBX-based applications are not all that friendly to the Internet protocol.

But when it comes to voice enabling existing IT applications, there is also a tendency to use the same VOIP technology experts preferred by the networking community because that seems to be what is getting all the noise these days.

But the traditional IT community has as much right to embrace VOIP as the so called VOIP specialists, and in some type of applications, such as portals, application developers and their tools may be even better suited to taking on the task than people whose first inclination might be to deploy a whole new set of applications.

Case in point is Seaport Hotel in Boston, which has built a reputation of catering to a technology-savvy clientele by being one of the first hotels to offer free wireless Internet access. Within each room, the Seaport Hotel now also offers customers access to a portal that they can customize to access their bills, e-mail and Web sites that may be of interest.

But when the hotel decided it wanted to provide access to local restaurants through the portal, they discovered they needed to voice-enable the portal application so people using the portal could touch the screen to initiate a call through their hotel room phone.

To provide this service, the hotel's vice president of technology, John Burke, and his staff looked at using VOIP products from companies such as Avaya or Cisco but quickly ruled them out because of cost and time to implement considerations.

They also looked at creating their own VOIP server using open-source Asterik technologies, but also quickly deduced that they would not have the in-house skills necessary to implement and maintain such a solution. And finally, the other approach that was considered but was quickly dismissed was trying to integrate Skype, but that introduced a host of security issues and the need to acquire Skype handsets.

During all this review process, Burke and his team stumbled across BlueNote Networks, a fledgling startup company that was started by a number of former IT people from Fidelity. Backed by Fidelity and the handful of other venture capitalists, the BlueNote offering is a software development kit that makes use of Web services to allow customers to add voice support for existing applications.

By using BlueNote Networks, the Seaport Hotel was able to voice enable the portal applications in a couple of months and then integrate that application with the existing PBX system so calls could be placed using the handsets in the rooms.

As big companies such as Cisco and Citrix continue to align their resources to jumpstart the use of voice within applications, we are sure to see a variety of approaches to voice-enabling applications in addition to ongoing efforts to replace PBX systems with lower costs VOIP networks.

But the interesting thing about the BlueNote Networks approach is that it serves as a reminder that you really don't need a cannon to shoot the proverbial fly.