Organizations of all sizes are looking for ways to streamline their communications services and save money at the same time. Many of them have already turned to IP telephony to help reach this goal, but they’ll need to go further to enable the full unified communications and collaboration experience.
Pack Your Trunk with SIP
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking is a popular option for businesses that want to extend communications capabilities beyond their own networks. As these organizations look to extend features such as presence, instant messaging, desktop video and application sharing in addition to voice and data, they find even more ways SIP trunking benefits their business.
Here are four key reasons why organizations should consider SIP trunking for their UC needs.
- Scalability. SIP trunking allows businesses to start out with the infrastructure they need immediately and then easily expand on-the-fly. A benefit of SIP is you only pay for what you use. This will help companies that want to roll out UC features gradually across departments or locations.
- Reliability and efficiency. With SIP trunking, organizations can set up their communications systems to automatically route calls to mobile devices or other lines. This is very handy when an office is closed, an employee is working remotely or on the road, or in the event of a power failure.
- Productivity. With its ability to seamlessly connect workers across different locations, SIP trunking brings unified communications tools to all users, helping them work more closely with colleagues and partners in a more efficient and productive environment—no matter where they’re physically present.
- Cost savings. Significantly lower call costs with SIP trunking leads to rapid ROI. With SIP, you only buy the capacity that you need and you have the flexibility to add more call instances on the fly when needed. SIP trunking can also reduce intra-company long distance fees because voice calls ride on your corporate network.
Going Mobile for UC
The mobility requirement is driving a lot of businesses to move to SIP trunking. Enterprises of all sizes are seeing a huge influx of personal mobile devices coming onto the corporate network, and between implementing a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy to handle those devices and purchasing and distributing a variety of smartphones and tablets themselves to employees, they are facing challenges on how to deliver all services to all users all the time.
SIP trunking answers this question by extending UC services while allowing enterprises to still benefit from their traditional TDM PBX even as they phase out that technology. For those that have fully switched over to IP, SIP trunking provides a seamless solution that gives employees and partners complete access to all communications options.
SIP Trunking on the Rise
As more large service providers offer SIP trunking and more options become available, expect prices to come down, allowing more organizations to take advantage of the service and reap numerous additional benefits including rapid ROI, the ability to quickly expand over geographic areas, and lower call costs, just to name a few.
And with UC in the workplace (and anywhere else workers are) SIP trunking makes the most sense to centralize all communications and collaboration across the enterprise.
ShoreTel has supported SIP since 2006 and has an established program for SIP certification, with more than 30 partners jointly participating, including large and small ITSPs, including AT&T, CenturyLink, TelePacific, Time Warner Telecom, Verizon, Windstream and XO Communications.
As CEO of Packet Fusion, Matt sets the tone and vision for our company and our customers. His 20+ years in telephony gives him a deep understanding of unified communications and collaboration technology. He is an engaging presenter and has a knack for breaking down the often over complicated VoIP technologies into plain and simple English. Outside of PFI, Matt’s happy place is on the golf course or on a bike ride with his daughters.