Masters of Converged Solutions: Sponsored by Sprint
“Session Management” has entered the UC lexicon as a way to take advantage of SIP-based services, such as SIP trunking or SIP-based UC applications without the need for a wholesale re-achitecture of your telephony environment. Session management is especially attractive for large companies who by growth-via-acquisition are sitting on mix of legacy systems from a variety of vendors, often with little to no interconnection.
Session management creates a new SIP-based layer that sits above existing systems. Most session management platforms can both integrate legacy systems via SIP, H.323 or Q.SIG, or even support SIP-based desktop or softphone clients. The resulting SIP layer, provides an interface to SIP trunking services and SIP-based applications as well the capability to easily implement custom call management policies (e.g. follow-the-sun call routing).
Session management is at the heart of Avaya’s Aura architecture, as well as Cisco’s recently released Unified Communication Manager: Session Management Edition. Session Border Control vendor such as Acme Packet also have the capability to provide a session management layer. In our conversations with those responsible for telecom architecture we’re finding growing interest in session management. The primary driver is to ease adoption of SIP trunking, but some IT planners are looking to session management as a way to delay the need to replace legacy phone systems. By integrating their older platforms into a session management layer they can take advantage of emerging SIP-based services, while in some cases even simultaneously supporting SIP-based end-points for new sites, or SIP-based desktop applications for telephony and presence management functionality.
- About Masters of Converged Solutions
Irwin Lazar
Irwin Lazar is the Vice President for Communication and Collaboration Research at Nemertes Research, where he develops and manages research projects, develops cost models, conducts strategic seminars and advises clients. His background is in network operations, network engineering, voice-data convergence, and IP telephony. Mr. Lazar is responsible for benchmarking the adoption and use of emerging technologies in the enterprise in areas including VOIP, unified communications, Web 2.0 initiatives, social networking, and collaboration.
A Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and sought-after speaker and author, Mr. Lazar is a columnist for No Jitter and Enterprise2Blog. He is a frequent resource for the business and trade press and is regular speaker at events such as Interop, VoiceCon, and Enterprise 2.0. Mr. Lazar serves as the conference director for FutureNet (formerly MPLScon), and is on the advisory board for the Enterprise 2.0 conference.
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