* Nortel’s statement on SIP
Two weeks ago, one of our subscribers contended that Avaya, Cisco, and Nortel had provided less-than-stellar support for Session Initiation Protocol, or SIP. This week, we’ll wrap up our miniseries about these companies’ support for proprietary voice protocols vs. their support for SIP. Today, we’ll relay Nortel’s prepared statement on its position.
The company writes:
“Nortel, a key developer of the SIP specification, is committed to standards and leads or participates on all of the standards bodies. This commitment applies to unified communications as well.
“Nortel is firmly committed to SIP interoperability. Today Nortel’s CS1000, MCS 5100/5200, CS2000 and SN08+ products support open SIP device and gateway standards. Nortel’s CS2100, Business Communications Manager (BCM) and contact center solutions will support SIP endpoints later this year and into 2006. Nortel is delivering open support with a variety of SIP devices and gateways including RIM BlackBerry and ipDialog ManiTone, Mediatrix, D-Link, Aastra, Polycom and Citrix. Interoperability with a wide variety of call servers and devices was also verified by iLabs during N+I in May 2005.
“Nortel is also committed to taking our customers to the future of SIP without losing the traditional features and values they built their businesses on. As such we have designed our architecture to enable an easy migration to the SIP environment while protecting prior investments. For example our converged desktop allows coexistence of traditional TDM, and SIP wired/wireless clients. The phones that Nortel is delivering today are designed to support SIP and later this year, we will be releasing SIP software, affording our customers the choice of interface into either a Nortel SIP call server or other vendors’ SIP servers.”
Next time, we’ll highlight three readers’ comments on the issue.
