Not much is happening these days on the hosted VoIP front which means that there is consolidation going on. That means in the technology continuum we have moved beyond the hype and into the reality of how to make the technology work profitability (aka mainstreaming). As part of the VoIP reality is the news that Microsoft is continuing it's SIP trunking relationships into mainstream release.

Microsoft has announced that Cbeyond and New Global Telecom (NGT) will offer their SIP services for the Microsoft Response Point phone system for small businesses. Microsoft is bragging they have conducted thorough tests of Cbeyond and NGT’s service and will take advantage of their channels to provide a complete VoIP solution to small businesses. Support for the two companies will be included in the release of Response Point Service Pack 1 later this year

Now those of us in the industry have known that Asterisk has been successfully used in this mode (SIP trunking) for a number of years and their is a host of third tier providers that offer that service.

Microsoft has bought that into the mainstream product cycle and inevitably will draw out others to respond. The problem we have had up to this point is that only the highly skilled could get an implementation working well if a problem occurred (for argument sake say a call transfer problem). With Microsoft pushing this as a viable technology, this will force others to respond accordingly hence my argument for mainstreaming of technology.

It is only a matter of time before SIP trunking becomes the standard mechanism for CPE based IP solutions which then means we can move to the next step and that is hosted applications services for communications.