VoIP Industry Newsletter: Focus on Topics in SIP Trunking

Jan 2009


In the world of VoIP, SIP Trunking has emerged as the most rapidly growing segment, and as a viable bridge to a wide range of add-on "hosted VoIP" applications. I call these applications, as a group, "SIP Trunking Plus."

For starters, I define SIP Trunking as follows: SIP Trunking allows inbound and outbound calls converted to SIP to travel through a core VoIP peering device (Softswitch, SBC, Gatekeeper), allowing enterprises to pay less for their long distance and local calling; it is a direct replacement of the T-1/PRI service historically sold to enterprises.

SIP Trunking is a great service because it opens up the PBX to long distance competition, and it clearly saves the enterprise money on both dedicated T1/PRI circuit costs and monthly usage - without being disruptive. This seems to signal that the move from the premise-based PBX to a "cloud" PBX is an incremental and long process. SIP Trunking Plus features are useful because they are not overly disruptive to existing telephone systems.

In a nutshell, once you can focus on individual applications that increase productivity, work better with mobility, improve existing PBX functionality and facilitate growth, there is a tremendous opportunity for recurring monthly revenue for carriers and service providers through add-ons that are of great benefit - in terms of cost and functionality - to the enterprise.

Below are several examples of applications that are getting traction in the SMB market.

Remote Worker Management
Workers not at the office - which represents 22% of workers in the US and an increasing numbers overseas - can be converted to SIP end-points and treated like any other telephone on the PBX with advanced features.

Web Portal and Mobile Management
Portal management for forwarding, presence, call logs, contacts, voicemail, various phone settings, etc. These will easily extend to mobile devices and can include voicemail and unified messaging. Most legacy PBX systems do not provide Web based portals, open APIs or mobile management.

Voice Mail, Presence and Unified Messaging
It is easy to redirect a call on a SIP Trunk to a hosted voicemail and unified messaging application. These applications can provide all kinds of advanced features including voicemail-to-email as an attachment and voicemail-to-email as text, visual voicemail on a smart-phone (iPhone, Blackberry, Symbian), web access to voicemail and management of settings.

Hunt Groups and Advanced Call Management
Companies that have their DIDs and toll-free numbers coming in on SIP Trunks can easily have those calls diverted through a call management system that can introduce an auto-attendant, hunt groups for certain blocks of numbers, ACD applications (call queuing, music on hold), etc.

At VoIP Logic, we work with carriers and service providers who are continually looking to enhance their service portfolio and meet more communications needs of their customers. It is interesting to see the range of communications applications that are being dreamed up - these are just some ideas.

All my best for a happy, healthy 2009!
Micah Singer - CEO, VoIP Logic

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