SIP profiles that match vendor PBX and SBC configurations are now top priority for a growing number of ICT buyers in the market for a SIP solution.
Comms providers with the capability to give customers what they want stand to win, those that don't are certain to foot the blame for any post-implementation issues.
While SIP is in the ascendancy interoperability remains an important challenge, according to a study by The SIP School. Encouragingly, the research states that 40 per cent of the organisations polled are leveraging SIP trunks in their business already. Another 18 per cent are researching or testing SIP trunking with two per cent poised to buy.
"SIP trunk adoption is one of the fastest moving trends in telecommunications for good reasons," said Graham Francis, CEO of The SIP School. "It offers benefits ranging from low cost calling, centralisation of lines into a business, fast disaster recovery (or failover) and much more.
"However, as the survey illustrates, PBX vendors, service providers and enterprise customers are finding that SIP is not always an easy service to implement and sometimes not easy to support if things go wrong, with an apparent change in emphasis this year on who owns the problem."
In previous surveys respondents spread the blame for deployment issues roughly equally between PBX vendors, service providers and SBC vendors. This year the balance has shifted to over 36 per cent of respondents placing responsibility at the door of the service provider.
"The IP PBX is possibly seen as a more continuous and less disruptive technology compared to the SIP trunk and therefore any problems are likely to be laid at the door of the provider," added Francis.
The survey's questioning of how problems are dealt with revealed various levels of success across the channel, with PBX and SBC manufacturers significantly outscoring service providers, hosted VoIP providers and resellers on their ability to fix. "Considering that respondents believe service providers now own the problem this indicates a clear development need," added Francis.
What can organisations do to ensure they get the most out of their SIP trunking solution? Interoperability testing is an important step in verifying that a SIP trunk solution will work with an organisation's comms infrastructure, while offering insights into ways of getting the most value.
"An independently verified configuration guide made available through a recognised interop programme offers assured support, a reduction in deployment issues and rapid resolution should they occur," said Francis.
Executives often view testing as an end of project task, something to check-off and show it actually works. But testing is central to the proposition and does more than just prove or verify that a solution can work. Testing delivers valuable insights in the form of independently verified 'profiles' that improve deployment success, explained Paul Cunningham of interoperability testing house tekVizion.
"An increasing number of PBX/SBC manufacturers as well as SIP trunking provider are independently taking this route," he stated. "Many responses to the survey point to problems for which there is technically no excuse. Things like codecs, audio paths and registration procedures are not rocket science.
"The causes of deployments not working are ultimately down to a lack of proper testing and documentation, thinly stretched technical resources, the sheer number of options and variations even within a single vendors' product offerings, plus the rate at which vendors introduce new features."
The proliferation of new features is not likely to slow down any time soon, nor can organisations rely on thinly stretched technical resources, so providers can, and should, be testing their solutions regularly to ensure a successful deployment that delivers maximum value, emphasised Cunningham.
"An increasing number of organisations are independently verifying SIP trunking and other elements through third party testing," he added. "Leading SIP trunking suppliers are coming to us to perform interoperability testing and we provide detailed documentation for various PBX/SBC configurations. In many cases this is on top of the basic testing they may perform in-house. They recognise the value of having their SIP trunk configurations independently and extensively verified."
Understanding these issues helps companies to focus their efforts on improving the 'failing' elements, and also ensures that they understand what to do when things go wrong so they can fix problems quickly.
"It's not ideal having a service that's feature packed if you can't rely on it to work as expected," commented Francis. "The issues identified in the survey can and should be solved by appropriately skilled and certified staff performing proper interoperability testing that is independently verified.
"Without this, providers are activating trunks and hoping the 'good luck' quoted in one survey response will make it work. Enterprise customers and service providers alike need to rely on more than luck if the benefits of SIP and related applications such as UC are to be realised."