If you and your company are involved in Voice over IP and Unified Communications then there's no doubt you'll have heard about SIP (the Session Initiation Protocol). You may be (even a little bit) excited about all the things it promises to achieve by enabling multivendor products and services to work together. However, sometimes it's good and even necessary to just stop and look closely at what's actually happening with SIP, who's using it and what lies ahead for this most disruptive of protocols!
So let's start by asking,
What is SIP?
Well, SIP is boring!
Ok, to me it's not boring. However to people who simply want to make phone calls and use IM or their Unified Communications client to 'reduce human latency' (yes, that's a real UC benefit) it's not really something they care about. Who wants to talk about signalling protocols, new SIP methods and the work of the IETF working groups? Not your customers that's for sure - all they want to know is will it work, how much and will it save them money?
Who's using it and Why?
In reality a lot of people are using SIP without really knowing about it as it is replacing a number of existing proprietary protocols in IP handsets, PBXs and of course is starting to displace digital trunks. Yes, I know that it doesn't provide all the features that a 'proprietary' protocol does. SIP can help in cutting PSTN access costs, integrate voice, presence, messaging, and video services for a great Unified Communications solution. Include the possibility of tying all of these services to business process applications; surely that beats the need for some obsolete phone feature that is pointless supporting anymore.
So, how is it developing?
It's the responsibility of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and its working groups to see that the protocol is developed in a structured manner, making it easy for companies to implement SIP in their products. This, as we all know, has not been plain sailing, hence the need for Interop testing to make sure things work together. Of course Interop testing is something that should continue to be done. It is interesting though that at an IETF conference (in 2008), one of the lead architects of SIP (Jonathon Rosenberg of Cisco Systems) suggested that instead of forging ahead developing SIP using the original concept of it being a pure Peer 2 Peer (P2P) protocol, the many SIP 'working groups' should take into account that SIP is rarely deployed this way and should maybe focus on making SIP work better when there are things like NATs, Firewalls and Session Border Controllers in it's path. This is an 'enlightened' suggestion and shows that 'Real World' experiences can effect the ongoing development of the protocol.
To build on this great work being done, the Basic Level of Interoperability for SIP Services (BLISS) working group has the charter of documenting variations of SIP implementations including interoperability issues in order to help companies develop products to work better in a heterogeneous environment.
Providers of the Service
It's hard to ignore that there are so many providers now offering SIP trunking services, a great thing for customer choice and flexibility. Also in view of the current economic climate it is a good way to offer customers a more economic alternative to traditional digital lines. This is good news if things work well but if not then customers will get frustrated and complain about being sold a technology that's not mature enough. Well, how can you ensure things run smoothly? A good start point is checking if PBXs and other SIP systems as well as SIP Trunks are 'SIP Connect' compliant. This is a great recommendation from the SIP Forum that attempts to make connectivity issues a thing of the past, so go to their website and read all about it.
Get tooled up
So as SIP is the 'plumbing' that makes things work and you call a plumber when your boiler breaks, doesn't it make sense to call a SIP expert to fix your SIP/Communication problems? Why not go one step further and get a SIP expert involved in the early stages such as planning and network design. This way they can advise on the right combination of products to use to meet your needs plus give you critical advice on what to do when adding new SIP services to your network. This ensures that you don't break your existing infrastructure.
So much more to say
As I said earlier, it is often necessary to stop and look at what is really happening with SIP and by doing this you'll put yourself in a great position to understand what vendors are doing with their products and maybe see if everyone is working toward the ultimate goal of true interoperability or if everything is interoperable as long as it's from one manufacturer. We'll see.
Hi there, thought I'd post our latest Press release on the blog as we are obviously pleased to gain approval from a company the size of Panasonic.
Birmingham, West Midlands, UK, 27 January, 2009
Birmingham based reseller; Vocale Ltd is gaining momentum as the provider of the global standard in SIP Training and certification on receiving the official stamp of approval from Panasonic Europe. Panasonic's Manager at the European Technical Support Centre - Paul Gorrigan says "I can fully endorse 'The SIP School' and the SSCA™ certification program as a means of filling the skills gap created in our sales channel due to the introduction of our next generation products".
Graham Francis, Managing director at Vocale Ltd said: "We're delighted to receive this endorsement from Panasonic. It proves that companies who are serious about their SIP based products understand the need to train their own technicians properly on SIP and to send a signal out to the channel to do the same"
"The demand for e-learning is going to rocket over the next few years as companies look to slash travel and subsistence costs, but also fill their training needs", he said. Francis said that The SIP School has been updated constantly to keep up with the ongoing development of SIP since its launch in 2007 and is confident that the inclusion of a new 'Unified communications' module will tempt even more companies to join up. "We have more 'industry giants' evaluating our SIP training and SSCA™ certification program and we will be announcing further endorsements over the coming weeks", he said.
Not SIP related but will definitely have an effect on everyone as ICAAN are to allow the creation of thousands more domain extensions such as .Car .Sport .Football .SIP (maybe), which is the biggest shake-up to the DNS system since it was put in place. I have already received pre-registration details from telnic.org inviting me to register for a .TEL domain, very useful in my industry sector. Where will it all end and does it really matter? I think that if you notice the search habits of people, including yourself; how often do you type in a domain name of a company based on their cool domain name? Are you more likely to type in a search in Google such as 'Cheap TV' and then click on the link in the results list than type http://www.Iwantacheaptv.com ? If so, will all these new domain names serve only to be a kind of branding for a company? Let's wait and see, can't wait to get my hands on www.grababeerandtakeagreatbig.sip
Full report @ http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/22/business/net23.php?page=1
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