The animated tutorial can be found at http://www.mcsforum.org

Supersized SIP Since SIP is an “open standard” enabling customers to select from the best-of-the-breed in SIP user telephones, conferencing equipment and other devices (presence-enabled devices, machines control, video and still-image cameras, home/business/military control and endless other possibilities).

Here are five key benefits of the SIP open standard.

First, customers can pick from a variety of leading SIP-based user call control platforms to build a complete VoIP solution best suited for your business.

Second, SIP eliminates dependence on a single vendor for features platform which means companies can use high-performance SIP user devices while using different hosted, managed or other SIP providers.

Third, SIP protects customer investment with interchangeable components and systems. For example, customers can swap out a call server without having to swap out the phones, which can account for 60% or more of the cost in a large enterprise VoIP implementation. This also means that considerable savings can be achieved through the user of “soft” endpoints.

Fourth, it accelerates the pace of change in SIP systems as customers, developers, carriers and investors can make investments knowing that new options will bring new services. For example, smart ATM-automated teller machines can provide SIP-generated “event notification” services. Since off-shore drilling is in the news, remote automatic “trigger notification” could close valves or other systems.

Fifth, while somewhat similar to other key issues, SIP will be integrated all types of software system such including UC-unified communications/collaboration, transaction systems, contact center, social networking (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), search (Google, Bing), manufacturing. In addition, SIP will have an impact on building expert systems, artificial intelligence and other knowledge engineering systems.

New Products Overview – Multi-Platform SIP Last week, we discussed interoperability between Avaya one-X and Microsoft Communicator. This week, we extend the tutorial focusing on extending telephony, presence and other communications features between different competitor systems. This tutorial explores extensions of SIP referred to as SPS-SIP Phone Support (from AudioCodes http://www.audiocodes.com) and SmartSIP (from NET http://www.net.com). While there are unique benefits to either solution, the overall benefit (see Supersized above for more) comes from reducing the need to “rip and replace” investments in SIP telephony endpoints. This also means that a customer can standardize on their favorite choices rather than being confined to a proprietary solution.

Here are some of the basic benefits to the Smart SIP or SPS systems:

- Supports telephone interoperability between Microsoft Communications Server and SIP phones such as Cisco, Polycom, Avaya, snom, softphones, custom and others (check with manufacturer for specific phoneset support)

- Supports basic telephony features such as Call Hold, Call Waiting, Call Transfer, Caller ID and others

- Multi-platform “Presence” status support between Communicator, SIP hardphones (with BLF-Busy Lamp Field), and softphones

- Provides a survivability solution for both home and branch offices

- Integrates with scalable media gateway and SBC-Session Border Controller systems

- Supports multiple Layer 4 Transport protocols such as TCP-Transmission Control Protocol (connection-oriented) and UDP-User Datagram Protocol (connectionless) – Provides security protection via TLS-Transport Layer Security and SRTC-Secure Realtime Transport Protocol

- Supports multiple CODECs for low-speed (narrowband) and wideband (high speed) “high fidelity” RTA-Real Time Audio

- Supports Contact List dialing and Directory lookup via Microsoft’s AD-Active Directory and other Microsoft infrastructure

Both AudioCodes and NET have great solutions to customers challenged economically and architectural with multi-vendor and multi-protocol installations.