VoIP vendors get serious about SIP

VoIP vendors poised to make news at VoiceCon this week say they will deliver on the multimedia and interoperability promises of Session Initiation Protocol with a lineup of products that use the protocol as a core IP PBX technology.

SIP has been hyped for years at conferences such as VoiceCon, but full commitment by top vendors has been lacking. The technology is lauded for its openness and flexibility, but vendors such as 3Com, Avaya, Cisco and Nortel balked at building pure-SIP versions of their gear, citing feature limitations.

Also see:
Cisco CallManager 5.0 upgrade could require broader net tweaking
New IP gear aims to improve virtualized call centers

To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

VoIP vendors poised to make news at VoiceCon this week say they will deliver on the multimedia and interoperability promises of Session Initiation Protocol with a lineup of products that use the protocol as a core IP PBX technology.

SIP has been hyped for years at conferences such as VoiceCon, but full commitment by top vendors has been lacking. The technology is lauded for its openness and flexibility, but vendors such as 3Com, Avaya, Cisco and Nortel balked at building pure-SIP versions of their gear, citing feature limitations.

Also see:
Cisco CallManager 5.0 upgrade could require broader net tweaking
New IP gear aims to improve virtualized call centers

3Com and Cisco are expected to lead the way at VoiceCon with new versions of their IP PBX platforms that use SIP as the core call control technology. Avaya plans to introduce a SIP-based, peer-to-peer VoIP system that does not use a central server.

3Com's NBX and Cisco's CallManager 5.0 will run native SIP, and when deployed with other applications could let users integrate desktop productivity applications with VoIP and IP video and instant-messaging technology.

"The reason SIP is going native [on IP PBXs] is to get away from the kludgey external proxy servers that were needed to have SIP interoperability in the past," says Brian Riggs, an analyst at Current Analysis.

"As service providers come out with SIP-based VoIP services, you can do away with voice T-1 lines and ISDN" and link directly into a voice provider via IP. "That can reduce costs," he says. "There are also a lot of SIP-based applications being written out there; SIP on the IP PBX will be necessary to support those."

The latest version of Microsoft Office, in which smart tags in documents can be tied to click-to-dial or other communications channels, is an example of this, he says.

Cisco's release of CallManager 5.0, rebranded as Unified CallManager, replaces the company's widely used Skinny Call Control Protocol with SIP. The new IP PBX release also lets organizations choose between a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 platform and a new, purpose-built Linux operating system for running the CallManager software. Cisco's top five competitors in enterprise telephony - 3Com, Alcatel, Avaya, Nortel and Siemens - have introduced Linux-based IP PBXs.

"The timing for us is good" for Cisco to move to a SIP-based CallManager, says Glen Waltman, principal IT technician for Air Products, an Allentown, Pa., supplier of industrial gas and chemical products. The company uses CallManager 4.0.

"Telephony is becoming an application; the more you can get down to it just being an application on a blade or appliance, it should make it easier to manage and you can get more out of it," Waltman says. "SIP seems to be the standard everyone is endorsing and moving to" in order to make that happen.

In addition to the new CallManager 5.0, Cisco plans to launch Unified Presence Server and Unified Personal Communicator, which will let users see the availability status of colleagues, and to combine voice, video, chat, e-mail and messaging into a single interface. Cisco says its presence server also can work with Microsoft's Office Communicator client, and the company's Unified Presence Server can interoperate with Live Communication Server (LCS), Microsoft's presence and multimedia communication platform.