Recently in SIP Category

When thinking about the education market, it's easy to envision a lab full of graduate students, building "the next Google" in their labs - tirelessly coding and tweaking their invention for the masses.  Often these young fresh minds develop incredible new technologies (including much of our communications infrastructure we use every day).  However, the reality of communications infrastructure within education is often very different.  Most educational institutions are strapped for cash, being sensitive to spend the public or private funding very carefully.  It's not uncommon to find schools and universities still using 20 year old telephone equipment and beige wall phones in the class rooms.

Meanwhile, much has changed since that beige telephone was installed.  Email, instant messaging, and Unified Communications (based on SIP) have come along - improving efficiency and mobility to the hard working teaching, operations and administration staff.  To-date, implementing Unified Communications meant working with one-size-fits-all UC systems from the incumbent equipment makers that are extremely costly and frankly not well suited to the education market. 

Can educational institutions adopt Unified Communications and be careful stewards of the funding?

I'll be addressing this and many other questions during a joint webinar titled "Experience Unified Communications Made for EDU by EDU" hosted by eZuce, Ronco Communications and AudioCodes on Thursday, December 9th at 10 AM ET.   To learn more about this event and register, visit the Information and Registration Page.
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I just had the pleasure of wrapping up another great case study with Experient, who are developing the ever-important 9-1-1 emergency services application for small governments.

Sometimes we urban and suburban dwellers forget how much of the country lies between our urban centers and the services we become accustomed to having on a daily basis.  9-1-1 is an example of a service like water and cable television we just expect to have and it should be "always on".  Not true in rural and small-town America where it's more common than not to find households using well water and satellite TV.

The challenge for small government is finding an affordable 9-1-1 service platform that can be effective and affordable for the tight budgets found in rural areas. 

Experient solved this unique challenge with a new product offering based on SIP, allowing them to use commercial-of-the-shelf (COTS) servers, media gateways and phones to create a 9-1-1 application without the cost of legacy proprietary boards.  A key obstacle they had to overcome was the interface to the unusual CAMA/MF analog trunks that the local service providers use to deliver 9-1-1 calls and the address information.

To read the complete case study, visit:

http://www.audiocodes.com/case-studies/experient-case-study

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Earlier this month I was happy to meet with Jeff Heibert, CEO of ROI Networks to LA for ITExpo for a discussion on a case study customer of theirs using Skype Connect in an Avaya environment using the AudioCodes Mediant 1000 E-SBC.  The E-SBC plays a key role to integrate the two systems and provide security to protect the Avaya SIP Enablement Server (SES) from attack via the public internet.  After some nudging, I got Jeff to sit with Erin to do a video interview of what we think is a fascinating case study.


Click on the thumbnail to view the video.

A key attribute of this case study is the end customer was able to leverage Skype Connect without expensive and disruptive upgrades to their Avaya Communications Manager.

A written copy of the case study is also available.

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Earlier this summer, I was fortunate to meet Cameron Symonds, Director of IT/TS at Triton Technologies.  Cameron had just begun the process of converting his Interactive Intelligence contact center over to SIP Trunking and in need of some help with a security and interoperability solution for his site.

Triton runs a moderate-size contact center that processes orders for a wide range of TV, magazine and other media promotions.

He'd been dabbling with using a firewall to secure SIP trunks, but was having a real challenge with SIP sessions and their separate media and control streams and IP addresses.  The firewall just didn't have the smarts to open and close the UDP ports and separate IP addresses to secure his trunks. Unless he could secure both, SIP trunking was a no-go for his company.  

Fortunately, we were able to help him out with a pair of new AudioCodes Mediant 1000 Enterprise Session Border Controllers (E-SBC) - making SIP Trunking transparent to the Interactive Intelligent contact center and securing his network.

You can read the full case study at:
http://www.audiocodes.com/case-studies/triton-technologies
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I've been a Skype account holder for years and it sure has come in handy for communicating back to the office and home from my far-flung travels.  It was real useful communicating with my older son while he was studying abroad and our travels to Europe this last spring.  But other than client-to-client communications, I was having trouble envisioning how businesses would adopt Skype.
 
That all changes with today's announcement of Skype Connect.  With Skype Connect, businesses can now integrate Skype inbound and outbound calling into their existing infrastructure, avoiding the "wait, I have to switch headsets" issue of having both a phone and Skype client on every-one's desktop.  

Beyond PBXs, I can see contact centers benefiting from Skype Connect, allowing callers to "Skype" into the contact center, instead of tying up the mobile or landline telephone.

Think of this as the ultimate "Toll Free" calling to reach your business.

So how does this work?  Skype Connect is essentially a SIP portal into the Skype network, allowing Skype Client and PSTN access.    If you have one of the select IP-PBXs that are Skype-ready, the Skype service can be provisioned to connect directly to your IP-PBX.  However, if you are like most businesses that have either a TDM PBX or a non-Skype-ready IP-PBX, you'll need a media gateway or E-SBC to terminate the Skype session.  

• TDM PBXs would use a media gateway with the TDM side facing the PBX - in most cases emulating the network side of a PRI circuit.  
• For IP-PBXs, an E-SBC would be used in a Back-to-Back User Agent (B2BUA) mode that terminates the Skype session, performs security checks and then re-initiates the call into your IP-PBX in a format that it understands.

Fortunately, we here at AudioCodes have validated our Mediant gateways for use with Skype Connect and they make a great fit for the configurations mentioned above.

It should be noted that Skype Connect is not free - like any business product that has value, there are subscription fees associated with it. 

Here's an excellent case study that shows just one example of what businesses are doing with Skype Connect. Continue Reading...

Yesterday I was fortunate to participate in one of the regional Contact Center Networking Group (CCNG) meetings here in Buffalo, NY.  The core theme of the event was a discussion on Avaya's roadmap and how it effects users of ex-Nortel systems.

The meeting kicked off with a presentation by the host company, American Coradius International (ACI) and Elaine Alvord, Director of IT.  ACI is a third-party collection agency, working for the major banks and finance companies to "educate" their customers on the value of repaying their loans.  Tough business to be in, but someone has to do it.

Anyhow, Elaine described how a few years ago ACI was limping along on an old Nortel Option 11 and ran into a number of compliance issues that would have limited the kind of work they would be able to perform for the major banks.  The biggest issue was an inability to do 100% recording, but their business reporting and efficiency was falling behind "state-of-the-art".  Elaine then continued to describe their search for a new SIP-based communications system and the eventual selection of CIC by Interactive Intelligence for their two sites.  As part of this purchase, they also selected two AudioCodes media gateways for their TDM trunking and e911 connectivity.  (Now you know why I was interested in the event.)

After Elaine's presentation, we took a quick tour of their Hamburg, NY site and got to watch and hear their agents "work the phones".  Reaching the debtor was surprisingly difficult - you can't just keep calling their home telephone and "hope they answer".  It takes real detective work to find when and where you can reach them for a live discussion. 

Yesterday's tour and discussion with some of the other contact center managers at the event gave me a new perspective on priorities in their business.  Certainly employee motivation and policies to maintain compliance are fundamental, but the technology used to build a contact center has a huge impact on their efficiency.  Their adoption of a state-of-the-art contact center software suite and quality equipment as a foundation has dramatically improved their business productivity and ability to land new business with the major banks.

It was a well spent morning and a fresh perspective of our business.

Oh by the way - it was good to meet the gang at ACI, but I hope they never need to call me!  (at least not to collect a debt)




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I'm seeing an ever-growing cross section of SME and Enterprise buyers listening and learning about SIP Trunking with the cost savings and flexibility piquing their interest.

However, many of the security, interoperability and survivability issues of SIP I have pointed out in previous posts have to-date stymied some of the growth and adoption of SIP Trunking.

As a result of these issues and the need to integrate SIP-based communications systems with a wide range of SIP Trunking service providers, a whole new category of customer premise equipment has recently evolved--the Enterprise Session Border Controller (E-SBC). The E-SBC is designed to be located on the customer premise and sit between the Local Area Network and the external Wide Area Network. Unlike the larger and more complex carrier-oriented Session Border Controller (SBC), the E-SBC is "right-sized" for a range of medium and large enterprises.

Unique functions of an E-SBC include:

Security: Often the first attribute to get mentioned about any SBC. Continue Reading...

• Security - knowing that your business is protected from malicious attack by outsiders that might have an axe to grind or trying to steal sensitive information.  
• Survivability - making sure you have a disaster recovery plan to keep the business operating when things do go wrong.
• Choice - having the freedom to make changes to and select your service provider based on price, service, quality or new capabilities.

Until recently, if you were in the process of deploying Microsoft's Communications Server it was pretty difficult to use SIP Trunking and still maintain security, survivability and choice.   Securing SIP Trunks requires a Session Border Controller at the enterprise from one vendor, while survivability required separate media gateways and back-up PSTN telephone lines.  The number of certified SIP Trunking vendors that have gone through the arduous certification program is fairly small and as a result, severely limits the choices available to most businesses.



With today's announcement of UcSIPT from AudioCodes, businesses deploying Microsoft Communications Server can leverage an AudioCodes E-SBC - one single device that has the ability to:

• Secure SIP Trunks - with an embedded Enterprise Session Border Controller (E-SBC), protecting the business against common SIP-based network attacks coming from the Wide Area Network that traditional firewalls are unable to mitigate.
• Provide Interoperability with SIP Trunks - via a back-to-back user agent with transcoding, virtually any SIP Trunking service provider can be used with Communications Server.
• Deliver Survivability - with an optional integrated media gateway modules, traditional PSTN lines can be maintained and used as back-up circuits in cases where there is a failure in the SIP Trunk connectivity or service.

As an example of a typical deployment, Joe LeNoach, IT Manager in Alutiiq offers the following assessment of his experience in using the Mediant 1000 MSBG to interface his Office Communications Server system with a SIP Trunking service provider:  "We have recently decided to use the AudioCodes Mediant 1000 for connecting our network to the Verizon SIP Trunking service," said Joe. "We were looking for a solution to securely connect the Microsoft Office Communications Servers installed in our branches using a cost-effective SIP trunking service. AudioCodes Mediant 1000 provided the required mediation services to implement this solution quickly and cost-effectively."

Jeff Kahn. Chief Strategic Officer and Nimrod Borovsky, VP of Marketing at AudioCodes discuss the UcSIPT strategy and solution set in this video.

It looks like businesses are one step closer to having the choice of SIP Trunking service provider, security and survivability without cobbling together a number of different appliances from different manufactures.  

For more information on UcSIPT, visit: http://www.audiocodes.com/ocs








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During this last "blogisode" we moved from a discussion about the technology and weakness of the SIP RFCs to what I feel is a far more difficult hurdle, the political challenges with SIP interoperability. As with national and global politics, getting people with diverse needs and existing investments to compromise is a significant challenge.

So how do we break the almost infinite cycle of continuous interoperability testing between the growing number of hardware vendors, software applications and carriers?

One approach that immediately comes to mind is to define a "gold standard" that each of the market participants can test against, and create a predictable level of interoperability assurance between systems. As one of my readers duly noted, this is the driving vision of the SIP Forum, and their SIPconnect effort, trying to make SIP Trunking interoperability more predictable. The SIPconnect Technical Recommendation 1.0 specifies the interface between a SIP-enabled Service Provider to a SIP-enabled Enterprise Network (aka "SIP Trunks"). Continue Reading...

 Earlier this week I shared with you a few thoughts on SIP Interoperability discussing what I felt where the root causes of incompatibility between two or more SIP-based systems.  I clearly hit a raw nerve with a few of you, flooding my email box with your own stories of interoperability issues.   You shared with me your own experiences with registration problems, call transfers, security, message waiting indications, even fax issues.  It seems the couple examples I gave were only the tip of the iceberg.

 

Let's move past the technical issues with SIP Interoperability and talk about a far more difficult challenge - the politics of SIP Interoperability.

 It appears to me that soon after the authors of RFC 3261 finished their work, the fun really started.  As the development teams of the various product and application companies started to build their solutions based on RFC 3261, the looseness of the specification allowed them to make wildly different choices all "within specification".   The result was that you had developers that had invested untold hours of hard work into developing a protocol stack that worked fine in their own lab and with their own products, but had serious interoperability issues with other vendors.  To each of the developers, it appeared that "everybody else screwed up". 

 So now you have a number of over-worked developers that would have to go back into their products and re-work significant parts of their SIP stacks - just because someone else made some bad choices.  The end result is a classic stand-off with each of the vendors saying "we followed the spec, you should change".  So much for "Open and Standard".

 

To make things even more politically complex, many of the vendors are starting to compete in the marketplace, vying for the same markets and customers.  In this competitive environment, interoperability is a double-edge sword.

 Okay, so let's pretend our developers get past their own stubbornness and decide to make some changes to be more interoperable.  Who do you do your interoperability testing with?  Do you test against anyone that comes along?  Or maybe just in cases where "the business case works"?   What happens if you or anyone else makes changes?  Do you re-test with everyone?  It was easy when there were just a few other applications to test with on the market, but now with hundreds of applications and devices to test, it becomes clear that the maintenance of SIP interoperability testing becomes a bigger burden than the original development. 

 So, how do we work around these political problems and break the cycle of continuous interoperability testing?  This will be the topic of my next post. 

 

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