Soap Box: Why Channel Partners Should Sell Standards

Chris Gatch, CTO, Cbeyond Inc.

VoIP has faced its fair share of challenges over the last decade. But today, the technology has earned its stripes as enterprises large and small are adopting VoIP technology at a lightning pace. Not only are cost-savings and improved productivity strong selling points, but so too are the scalable architecture and growing list of capabilities. From voice to video to virtual assistant, VoIP has a lot to offer and a very bright future.

IP PBXs, in particular, have gained strong traction in the VoIP marketplace, and have overtaken traditional TDM-based PBX deployments. But as VoIP continues to gain prominence and acceptance from businesses, leveraging the most efficient standards for operating such technology becomes even more important.

For example, end users of business-class VoIP are realizing increasingly the limitations of traditional TDM technology, such as trunking gateways, when connecting their IP PBXs to their VoIP service providers. As technology evolves, businesses update their legacy systems to leverage a more advanced and more reliable service. Today, equipment manufacturers and service providers largely have reached a consensus that session initiation protocol (SIP), and more specifically SIPconnect, will be the primary protocol for such interconnections.

SIP is an industry-standard signaling protocol used to establish communication sessions over a data network. SIPs flexibility can enable a simple two-way telephone call or a more complex collaborative, multimedia conference. With its robust capabilities, SIP is the protocol of choice for initiating conferencing, telephony, multimedia and other communication sessions over the Internet.

SIPconnect is an initiative championed by the SIP Forum. It is a standards-based approach to enable direct peering between SIP-enabled service provider networks and SIP-enabled enterprise networks. You might know this type of peering by the more common term SIP trunking. SIPconnect provides precise guidance in the areas where standards leave multiple implementation options, and specifies a minimal set of capabilities that should be supported by the service provider and enterprise networks. The result is end-to-end VoIP for IP PBXs connected to a public network.

SIP ensures end-user VoIP implementations will become increasingly simple and standardized. SIPconnect is a technical recommendation that builds SIP to ensure that the various protocols associated with SIP are applied appropriately to a specific scenario of SIP trunking. SIPconnect ensures end users their IP PBX and service providers will function well together to provide a consistent quality of service, and enhanced capabilities such as direct-inward-dial, per user feature control and even enhanced redundancy capabilities.

The implementation of SIP and SIPconnect benefits many participants in the delivery of voice communications and reduces telephony costs, but businesses and end users derive the greatest benefits. For end users, large and small, SIPconnect eliminates or greatly reduces the need for costly gateways at their sites. In addition, new features from the service provider or the IP PBX vendor will be delivered quicker.

For channel sales partners, SIPconnect eliminates the headaches of complicated integration and troubleshooting, and allows resellers to focus on other revenue-generating activities. However, the business benefits yield even greater returns. By leveraging a commonly accepted, standards-based approach, companies can integrate new products and features from the service provider or the IP PBX vendor faster. Leading-edge solutions like integrated voice mail and fax-to-e-mail solutions can be implemented easily and features for telephone numbers and extensions can be personalized by individual users. SIPconnect also drives improvements in voice quality by removing gateway latency and addressing important quality of service areas such as echo cancellation as well as fax and modem support.

Ultimately, SIP standards and SIPconnect increase your customers abilities to acquire enhanced applications from service providers and extend the functionality of their IP PBXs across service provider networks. Therefore, channel partners can benefit from informing customers they are selling certified products and services, and that SIP is poised to be the leading VoIP standard. Besides, the ability to sell the “next big thing” at a reasonable price is a bonus.

Christopher C. Gatch is the CTO for Cbeyond Inc., an IP-based managed services provider. He also serves on the board of the Cisco BTS 10200 Users Group and the Service Provider Board of the International Packet Communications Consortium (IPCC).