SIP-Based VoIP: The Next Opportunity For VoIP VARs?

Communicating used to be simple. If you wanted to call someone, you dialed a telephone, and if you were lucky, they were available to talk. If they weren't available, you left a message on their answering machine and waited for them to call back. Today, everyone is connected through a myriad of devices, media, and networks — and staying connected seems to be more important than ever. Your business customers are no different. They want to be able to send e-mails to telephones and phone messages to computers. They want to be able to leave a single number where they can be reached, no matter where they are. And they want to be able to send, retrieve, forward, and store text-based documents, videos, IMs (instant messages), and a plethora of other types of information instantaneously.

SIP (session initiation protocol) may be the means to achieve this communications nirvana, otherwise known as ‘unified communications (UC).' SIP is a text-based protocol, similar to HTTP and SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol), designed for initiating, maintaining, and terminating interactive communication sessions between users. VARs can use SIP to provide their clients with enhanced communications solutions and services, more choices in terms of what can be connected to networks, and lower costs and increased flexibility in connecting to service providers. Four leading telecommunications vendors explain how SIP – and UC – can provide VARs with new opportunities in the VoIP market.

UC is a presence-enabled communications and collaboration system, with integrated telephony and e-mail and with a unified user experience over any device, anywhere, anytime," explains Tony Rybczynski, director of strategic enterprise technologies for Nortel. The power of SIP is that it is an industry standard, is media agnostic, and has extensive negotiation capabilities for point-to-point and conference multimedia communications [e.g. an IM, voice call, multimedia session, multiparty session]. SIP also eliminates the distinction between traditional ‘lines' and ‘trunks.' The same protocol can now be used both for end devices and within the network. It can be used inside the organization, or outside the organization, to talk to other organizations or to subscribers on a service provider network. SIP and unified communications create immense opportunities for VARs to participate in a rapidly growing market that will grow to more than $10B in the next five years.