Recap and thoughts on Internet Telephony

September 13, 2007

I'm back in the office and as promised, thought I would share some observations from this week at Internet Telephony. While I spent most of my non-meeting in the IP Communications Conference - Conferences SIP sessions trying to get a pulse on where the attendees and vendors were with the current state of SIP. A few observations:

Security - it is just starting to hit everyone that for the dream to come true of distributed enterprises, work at home agents, and other applications that will realize the flexibility of SIP - security will be huge. Some of the conversation was a little too "there's a bogeyman in the closet", but most of it was very reasonable. It's clear that SIPS (SIP over TLS) and SRTP are going to become "checklist items" for both enterprise and service provider applications. Fortunately, we at AudioCodes saw this coming and support both on a wide range of products.

SIP for the sake of SIP - during the Contact Center session there was some heated debate on whether SIP has gone from an enabling technology to a marketing buzzword. During lunch my table debated whether SIP was being overblown. We likened it to SIP being the railroad tracks and transporting freight is the product. A contact center doesn't have to have SIP to do all the distributed functions, but it does make it a lot easier for the solution designer to find standard parts that can quickly connected together (like rail cars in the metaphor).

SIP Trunking - as predicted, the SIP Trunking sessions were completely full and we could have used a much larger room. The audience picked up on some interesting details with SIP trunking and hybrid applications using both TDM and SIP trunks. The idea is that a SIP enterprise would start with TDM trunking via a gateway, then add an eSBC and SIP trunking to "test the waters". This allows an enterprise the flexibility to move their traffic based on performance and "not put all their eggs in one basket".

Expo- I barely got an opportunity to walk the floor, but it seemed pretty busy with good traffic. As you'll see in Tom Keating's blog, some of the vendors must have had some marketing money to spend in "non orthodox ways".