The Session Initiation Protocol, or SIP, has always seemed like one of those terms that people sort of understand – but not really. Hopefully our previous post on SIP helped shed more light on the topic but in this post we’re going to get to the real meat of the matter: the benefits that SIP provides in a typical organization.
By way of ultra-brief review, SIP is a signaling protocol intended to help set up and tear down sessions in a multi-media, Unified Communications environment. That includes not just VoIP phone calls, but video calls, instant messaging, whiteboard sessions, the gamut.
Enable rich, unified communications with SIP
So the benefits of SIP start with the kind of rich communications it helps foster. Consider this
example. An executive has a stupendous idea so he clicks a button in his address book to quickly send an instant message to his 5 direct reports, inviting them to a conference call, complete with an online whiteboard component. Three of them are in the office and respond quickly but two others are on the road. One of them dials in from a taxi – no whiteboard for him – and the fifth doesn’t respond. The manager clicks a button to record the meeting for the missing team member. After a few minutes outlining ideas and tasks on an online whiteboard, the meeting breaks up and everyone has their marching orders, including the missing team member who will view the recording when he’s available. Behind the scenes, it was SIP setting up and tearing down the various sessions involved in the call.
To be sure, this kind of unified communication is possible without SIP. But SIP is an open protocol that makes it a whole lot easier for vendors who supply various pieces of the puzzle to ensure their bit plays nice with all the others, whether that piece is an online whiteboard, presence capability, VoIP phone or what-have-you.
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BEST PRACTICES: Moving Your Enterprise to an SIP-Enabled Architecture
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And note that the one employee who was on the road and thus couldn’t effectively access the whiteboard function didn’t scuttle it for the others. Rather than a least common denominator implementation, SIP lets each user take advantage of whatever features and functions are available on their particular device and network at any given time.
SIP trunking: the key to IT cost savings
And those are just the benefits that your users will realize. There’s also lots to like about SIP from an IT and cost perspective. Chief among them is the idea of SIP trunking, which helps companies wring great efficiencies from the trunks they get from carriers. As The VOIP World blog put it:
The benefits of SIP trunking are many:
• As mentioned earlier, it reduces calling cost to a great extent and you can turn all calls to local calls. Since calls travel over the Internet, or through the VoIP phone system to a termination point, the charges on long distance calls are reduced.
• SIP trunking also reduces the costs on separate voice and data connections and increases the benefits for communication systems using both voice and data together.
• The capacity of this sort of phone system is huge with the potential to serve an entire organization, irrespective of its size. Big [multi-national corporations] or multi-size organizations can use a single SIP trunking account rather than multiple PRI connections.
• As business grows, the communication can grow easily without having to make gateway or card investments.
Essentially, SIP trunking enables you to eliminate expensive lower-speed voice and data lines and pool them all into one larger trunk, which you can then divvy up for use by any application. As The VOIP World blog noted, you can also send calls over the Internet when appropriate, using least-cost routing. The cost savings can be signficant, as much as a 20% to 60% reduction as compared to traditional analog voice networks and packet switched data networks. What’s more, SIP will work with much of the voice and data networking equipment you’ve already got in place,
To learn more about the benefits of SIP, including how to implement it for your environment, download our FREE whitepaper – Moving to an SIP-Enabled Architecture, or contact Carousel today to speak with one of our Unified Communications experts.
