SIP vendors getting ready to strut their stuff

More than 20 vendors of Session Initiation Protocol -enabled products later this month will band together in an interoperability demonstration to show customers what their offerings can do.

The SIPop booth at the Fall 2003 VON  trade show in Boston Sept. 22-25 is scheduled to include a variety of products, including videoconferencing systems, phone services software and media servers.

"The goal is to show how applications can be supported seamlessly across multiple platforms," says Carl Ford, who is helping organize the event for the show producer, Pulver.com. "This is a significant display that SIP is readily available for people to purchase." Some vendors will publicly test whether their gear is interoperable with others', without knowing ahead of time whether it actually is, organizers say.

SIP, a real-time communication protocol, enables peer-to-peer style communication among devices on an IP network, making it possible to put much of the call intelligence within end devices, such as phones. This enables placing more features on these devices rather than relying on equipment at the core of networks to supply features centrally.

At SIPop, Pactolus Communiction Software plans to demonstrate its SIP-based service software working with Common Voices' voice-mail and unified messaging software. The combination could enable such offerings as pre-paid calling service that could leave a network-based voice mail if the called party doesn't pick up. The network could retry the called party later to deliver the voice mail.

Organizers of SIPop were still nailing down specific demonstrations, but Marconi said it plans to show its ViPr desktop videoconferencing appliance in combination with SIP voice vendors' offerings to demonstrate video calls augmented by video streams of, say news feeds, or audio from telephone callers.

Other vendors plan to provide technology to put their colleagues' equipment through their paces. RadCom will supply its MediaPro voice-over-IP analyzer to test the quality of voice calls set up in the demo area. It will also generate simulated SIP calls to stress-test other vendors' gear. Agilent says its NgN Analysis System will  monitor and manage the traffic on the test network to troubleshoot problems and perform service-level management.