SIP trunking

Sprint Rolls Out General Availability of SIP Trunking

Sprint was one of the first SIP trunk providers certified with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (OCS 2007 R2). Now it is expanding availability of SIP trunking to all business customers.

Sprint SIP trunking customers will be able to leverage Sprint’s Global MPLS network and utilize a single IP network connection to facilitate voice, date, and video conferencing connections.

SIP trunking and VoIP enable customers to save significantly over traditional local and long distance expenses, and it is also a key component of unified communications.

SIP Trunks Gain Appeal in a Down Economy

SIP trunking has been a very hot technology in 2009- thanks in no small part to Office Communications Server 2007 R2. In fact, Microsoft shook the SIP trunking world up again recently with its announcement to partner with JaJah which will enable customers to place calls from almost any device to almost any device using VoIP, and let OCS 2007 R2 customers begin making calls almost immediately when deploying the server.

SIP trunking offers savings by eliminating some hardware components and more importantly by cutting costs and increasing efficiency. Adam Boone, vice president of marketing at Sipera Systems said “The economic crisis has underscored for us that any technology that enables greater enterprise process efficiencies actually is relatively recession proof” in a recent interview.

The rest of the interview with Boone is interesting and worth a read. SIP trunking is a step in the evolution from traditional voice to a completely software-based, IP-voice implementation. Be sure to keep security on your to-do list though. Part of the reason that Sipera Systems is gung ho on SIP trunking is that they offer appliances and services that let customers deploy it securely and extend it to remote and branch workers. Take a look at what they have to offer and how it can enhance your SiP trunking VoIP infrastructure.

SIP Trunking: The Key to Maximizing UC Benefits

VoIP and unified communications each have a lot of promise in and of themselves. They each deliver innovative tools that allow businesses to operate more effectively and efficiently. As the Executive Summary of this presentation states though, deploying UC is not without challenges.

Too often, organizationsgo down the path of deploying new technology with old technology principles in mind and UC is no different. Many of the early adopter deployments of VoIP and UC were designed exactly the same as the old systems, severely limiting the overall value of UC, which is a highly flexible, IP-based solution.

Migrating from traditional trunk lines to SIP trunking is a very simple, cost-effective change to open doors to other advanced services that can enhance a UC deployment. SIP trunking will allow companies to recognize the following benefits:

• Dramatically lower the overall cost of communications
• Extends UC to software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and other cloud-based options
• Accelerates UC deployments through the simplification of network design
• Easier migration to other advanced services such as mobile integration and MPLS networks

For more about SIP trunking and the impact that SIP trunking has on a successful UC deployment, check out this TechTarget presentation: SIP Trunking Is Key to Accelerating Unified Communications Deployments

BCI Chooses Sipera for UC Security

Chile-based Banco de Credito e Inversiones (BCI) has chosen Sipera to secure their unified communications infrastructure. Using Sipera’s IPCS unified communications security appliances provides BCI with real-time unified communications security backed by the research and expertise of Sipera’s VIPER Lab.

Sipera also enables BCI to leverage more cost-effective SIP trunking rather than relying on trunk lines, and allows BCI to deploy unified communications more efficiently and provides quality of service monitoring and reporting that BCI didn’t previously have. You can learn more about Sipera unified communications security appliances and services at Voicecon in Orlando this week. Sipera is at Booth 1500.

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Skype Looks for Enterprise Legitimacy with New Offering

Skype has been around for awhile and most people are at least familiar with its existence. Skype was one of the first to popularize the concept of leveraging the global networking capabilities of the Internet, and voice over IP (VoIP) to enable free, or virtually free calls to anywhere in the world.

Skype is more than just a voice system. It essentially offers a pseudo-unified communications experience, combining VoIP with video conferencing and instant messaging. It wraps all of those features up in a sort of peer-to-peer (P2P) social networking infrastructure.

As popular as it has been with tech-savvy consumers, especially the frugal ones, Skype has long posed a dilemma for enterprises. Few organizations have actually embraced or adopted Skype in any official capacity, but many have had to struggle with what to do about users who install and use Skype on company PC’s over the company network. There are bandwidth issues, compliance issues, and security issues just to name a few. Simply banning or blocking Skype has been one approach.

Skype announced a new offering that seeks to change how Skype is perceived by enterprise customers. Playing on the booming growth of enterprise VoIP, and the growing popularity of SIP trunking, Skype is Beta testing a new offering called Skype for SIP for Business Users. The new offering opens up some new streams of revenue for Skype, and unique possibilities for organizations- especially combined with direct SIP trunking in Microsoft OCS 2007 R2.

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SmartSIP Provides Exciting Possibilities for OCS 2007 R2

When Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (OCS 2007 R2) was unveiled in February of this year, it signaled the beginning of the end for the PBX or IP PBX. That is just my opinion I suppose, but it at least signaled proverbial dropping of the gloves as Microsoft moves forward with plans to make the PBX obsolete.

One of the features of OCS 2007 R2 which signal the first step toward killing off the PBX is the ability to do direct SIP trunking- connecting a VoIP provider directly to OCS 2007 R2 without the need for a PBX appliance between them. This is good news, but not great news. The reason it is not great news is that Microsoft only has partnerships with two VoIP providers, severely limiting the potential of the direct SIP trunking feature.

That is where SmartSIP comes in. Evangelyze Communications,  a global voice and unified communications products and professional services organization that specializes in Microsoft Unified Communications IP telephony products and services, has developed a suite of custom tools that extend the functionality of Microsoft OCS and open new possibilities for unified communications. One of those tools is SmartSIP.

According to a recent blog post from Mike Stacy, Director of Services for Evangelyze Communications, SmartSIP “will allow you to connect OCS with virtually any SIP system – TCP or UDP.  The most common use is to connect a Mediation server to a customer’s existing ITSP, but it can also connect to other IP gateways, SBCs, IP PBXs, etc.”

The product is still in Beta now with the first release scheduled for April. Stacy’s blog post thought talks about the excitement that SmartSIP is generating in the field, and some of the innovative solutions that are possible with SmartSIP like the ability to provide failover redundancy for the VoIP connection, or saving a 350-user company over $90,000 on their unified communications implementation.

Check out Mike Stacy’s blog for more details, and check out the Evangelyze Communications site for more about SmartSIP and the other tools available such as SmartChat and SmartVoIP.

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OCS 2007 R2 Not Yet a PBX-Killer…Or Is It?

At least that is the verdict of this SearchVoIP article by Michael Morisy. I do agree that the recent R2 release of Microsoft Office Communications Server is not perfect. Some of the issues pointed out by those interviewed in the article are related to scalability- they claim that OCS 2007 R2 is not built to support 10,000 plus users and is limited to small deployments.

However, this article describes how OCS 2007 R2 can be used to support an environment of 100,000 endpoints, and states that one OCS 2007 R2 Enterprise Edition Front End server is capable of supporting approximately 12,500 endpoints by itself.

At the end of the article Mike Stacy, Evangelyze Communications Director of Services, is quoted as saying “R2 is viewed as complementary to the PBX. With R3, I don’t think it’s a secret that Microsoft wants to replace the PBX.”

OCS 2007 R2 may not yet be a PBX-killer, but I think it at least mortally wounded it. OCS 2007 R2 includes the ability to do direct SIP-trunking, connecting the VoIP service directly to OCS without a PBX. One handicap is that Microsoft only supports direct SIP-trunking with two providers at this time. Stacy’s Evangelyze Communications though is set to introduce a product (SmartSIP) that bridges that gap and allows OCS 2007 R2 to be used directly with any VoIP provider- effectively eliminating the PBX and enabling companies to move forward with OCS 2007 R2 while leveraging their existing desktop phone hardware investment.

Sipera Enhances UC Security

In the Press Release from Sipera, it explains that “For enterprises utilizing SIP trunks to connect to their service providers, Sipera not only offers comprehensive security for these SIP trunks, but also addresses key deployment issues by offering additional Session Border Control (SBC) functionality.” SIP trunking is one of the hot trends within the hot trends of VoIP and Unified Communications. Updates to the Sipera IPCS appliance include:

• Certificate provisioning proxy for improved access control
• HTTP/TFTP proxy for web services and configuration, and LDAP proxy for
  directory services, for faster and easier deployment of remote phones
• TLS/SRTP proxy for encryption, further ensuring communications privacy
• Network, device, user, domain, and time of day granular policy
  enforcement.

XO Communications and Cisco Work Together

XO Communications’ XO SIP has passed interoperability tests with Cisco’s Smart Business Communications System. The combination of the 500 series unified communications solution from Cisco, and XO SIP, provides customers with a managed SIP trunking solution for the Cisco unified communications platform. You can learn more about both products, and the benefits of their partnership, from this CNNMoney.com article.