That’s the headline on an article by Steven Burke on CRN.com, and how, you might ask, has Iperia managed to get in the middle of a clash of titans for unified communications (UC) business? I’ll let Mr. Burke and our own Chris Poer do the explaining:

Chris Poer, vice president of marketing and sales for Billerica, Mass. based Iperia, the maker of the IperiaVX services creation platform, agreed. He said IBM’s middleware software is helping Iperia dramatically reduce development time for creating telecommunications applications for customers.

Poer said IperiaVX combined with IBM middleware has reduced the time it takes to create some service provider applications from definition to implementation from what was once five years to five to seven months. “The development of the actual application is no longer the long pole in the tent,” said Poer. “It no longer defines the length of the process.”

All I know is, anything IBM vs. Microsoft tends to be entertaining, so keep your eye on these two as they square off in the UC market.