In something akin the "Bride of Frankenstein" I read about someone porting SS7 software to Windows NT. SS7 is the protocol which giant phone switches (like the AT&T 5ESS) use to talk to other phone switches. So, why would you want to connect your NT server to a giant phone switch with SS7? You wouldn't. But, you might want to *replace* some of the functionality of the giant multi-million-dollar phone switch from New Jersey with a much, much cheaper Windows NT box if you were not so concerned about reliability or employing thousands of engineers. Ever wonder why AOL is always in the news for their outages? Just kidding.
Seems like a trend that people will be trying to do flanking maneuvers around these giant phone switches for all sorts of reasons, including toll reduction, call diversion, remote access, etc... Interesting stuff. I always wondered how giant phone switches talk to each other and now I can run it on my pentium at home.