The SIP trunking solution market continues to grow rapidly. Providers proved invaluable to organizations as they moved to remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Companies continue to migrate from legacy PBX and telco services. Moreover, SIP trunking is typically less expensive than legacy circuits.

Our latest CF List focuses on SIP trunking. This is the second annual list focusing on this technology and industry. Analysts with S&P Global Market Intelligence and Frost & Sullivan, and executives with Telarus and Avant, weighed in on SIP trunking market trends and what it takes to be a successful provider.

The global SIP trunking solution market exceeded $14.4 billion in 2020 and should surpass $31.2 billion by 2028, according to Strategic Market Insights. Look for an 11.8% compound annual growth rate through 2028.

Accelerating Trends

451 Research’s Raul Castanon

Raul Castanon is senior research analyst with 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence.

“The pandemic accelerated several IT and communications technology trends,” he said. “At a high level, features and capabilities focused on providing ease of use have proven their value, enabling IT organizations to quickly and easily provision services, regardless of their or their employees’ location. Specifically when it comes to SIP trunking, a key innovation is direct programmatic access via APIs. These capabilities are redefining the landscape, positioning CPaaS vendors as emerging competitors.”

Mike Baillargeon is Telarus’ UC/CC solution architect for the East.

Telarus’ Mike Baillargeon

“During the last 18 months, the focus has been on how to securely move a workforce to a home office while providing the same experience as in the office,” he said. “This leads to customers expecting a better experience from a billing, service delivery and uptime point of view. Based on this pressure, providers have placed a renewed emphasis on customer experience (CX). We believe providers are seeing a unique window in moving a large number of customers to a modern connectivity model, but in order to retain these clients, suppliers have added staff in the areas of customer success and account management.”

SIP Trunking Proved Its Value

Michael Brandenburg is senior industry analyst of connected work at Frost & Sullivan.

Frost and Sullivan’s Michael Brandenburg

“During the pandemic, SIP trunking kind of proved its value because it allowed the quick shifts that needed to happen for remote work,” he said. “One of the providers told me they had customers just double their capacity for their SIP trunking services. They needed one trunk going in and one going back out. These are not really new capabilities; it’s just that customers never really thought they’d have to use SIP trunking in that way. It was always treated very statically and the dynamic value of SIP came through.”

There’s a general trend of moving to cloud and UCaaS, Brandenburg said. Therefore, the role of SIP trunking is changing to one of pure connectivity.

“So it’s not just a cheaper way to transport your voice lines into your on-premises,” he said. “It’s not only the connectivity back to the corporate office solution or to the contact center. It’s a way to unify all of a company’s telephone numbers and direct them wherever they need to go, whether that’s to a legacy on-premises solution, a cloud contact center, or Microsoft Teams or Zoom Phone, or even in some cases RingCentral.”

SIP Trunking Takes Back Seat to UCaaS, CCaaS

Erin Christianson is executive vice president of strategic partners at Avant.

Avant’s Erin Christianson

“I feel that SIP trunking has taken a back seat compared to UCaaS and CCaaS during the pandemic,” he said. “However, I do believe that customers’ expectations and requirements are changing. Customers are aptly exploring ways to connect into existing on-premises phone systems and asking how they can leverage SIP or direct routing into collaboration platforms like Microsoft or Cisco. With this, I feel that as hybrid environments continue to be the norm, customers will need to understand what’s available and effectively integrate with a myriad of voice platforms.”

Vendors/suppliers are building flexible SIP solutions that can integrate into multiple collaboration environments, Christianson said.

“Today’s enterprise customers are not built on one system as they were in the past,” he said. “Enterprise customers leverage various collaboration platforms. Customers are in search of solutions that can seamlessly make an impact to the bottom line, ones that are built for successful integration, use and ease of adoption among the business units.”

We’ve compiled a list, in no particular order, of 20 top SIP trunking providers. It’s based on feedback and recent news reports. The list includes a mix of well-known providers as well as lesser-known ones making strides in SIP trunking This is by no means a complete list.

Scroll through our slideshow above to see who made our latest list of SIP trunking providers.