SIP
SIP has been around for around 20 years now, and yet engineers are still finding new ways to use it to address telecommunications challenges. One emerging method is SIP session management, which offers the potential to simplify communications system and policy management by fundamentally rethinking the way organizations deploy and integrate disparate communications applications.
SIP session management creates a SIP-based mediation layer that sits above existing systems. This layer serves to manage interconnectivity between various SIP-based applications such as IP-PBXs, video systems, and presence platforms. The end results include better scalability, centralized control, policy management, and access points for services such as SIP trunking.
SIP session management addresses the challenge of operating a multi-vendor, multi-protocol telecommunications environment by enabling easier interconnectivity of SIP-based applications, often mediating between various proprietary implementations of SIP or SIP extensions. It also allows easier implementation of SIP trunking by allowing IT architects to centralize SIP trunks into the data center—using the session management layer to interconnect distributed PBXs with the SIP session manager. This helps to reduce cost and complexity for SIP trunking, and more easily enables the ability to implement policy management for inbound and outbound calls (e.g., based on load, time of day, source of call, etc.)
We’re already seeing companies benefit from this approach. In one case, a large financial services firm cut its audio conferencing expenses by 90% using SIP session management to easily integrate a SIP-based, on-premises conferencing bridge with its existing telecom system—thus eliminating the cost of its hosted conferencing services. In another example, a large organization used SIP session management to centralize SIP trunks into a small number of a locations, which simplified implementation.
If your environment consists of distributed PBXs and/or multiple vendors, or if you just want to look at options for centralizing your existing telephony infrastructure, investigate SIP session management as a possible option.
