One of the hottest current topics when engaging with IT Managers and Business Owners, is the increasing awareness and appreciation of the benefits of deploying SIP Trunks as a part of their business connectivity strategy.
With more than 1,200,000 SIP channels deployed to market already, predictions are for a sharp acceleration in growth as more powerful connectivity options become both ubiquitous and more affordable.
With connectivity choices having now moved beyond simple DSL broadband, options such as: EFM, FTTC and Fibre Circuits are enabling cost effective, reliable and secure SIP Trunk service deployment.
For many the major advantage of deploying SIP Trunks is clear, cheap business phone calls! This includes free calls between sites for multi-location businesses. What is more, with calls travelling via internet links, businesses can immediately benefit from the savings of line and service provider consolidation. Some estimates put these potential OPEX savings as high as 40% to 50% of total voice spend!
However, for some savings are not viewed as the greatest benefit delivered by this solution. For example, with both business numbers and service functionality being held ‘in the cloud,’additional business benefits might include:-
- Scalability – The ability to add and remove lines at short notice to match business fluctuations and seasonal promotions.
- Growth – Additional trunks and capacity can be added quickly without the wait from traditional line suppliers and the need to buy your line capacity in batches.
- Flexibility – With inbound and outbound calls travelling via an internet service provider, businesses are not restricted to their hard-wired local exchange. Wherever there is a data circuit, calls can be made and received, with voice merely being an additional application delivered over a data connection. What is more, because numbers effectively live in the cloud, they can be taken anywhere, deployed to mobile devices or even used over somebody else’s landlines. Calls can be made from one or many locations without UK geographical restriction, with your key business numbers not being restricted by location. For example a call to a 01159 Nottingham office number can be delivered to alternative offices in Leicester, Derby, Birmingham, the choice is yours.
- Alternatives – Cloud based functionality can enable SIP calls to be delivered to multiple end points, sequentially or simultaneously, commonly known as “ SIP Forking ”. Therefore in mobility scenarios or disaster recovery situations important calls are not lost.
- Business Continuity – When confronted with a business communication challenge, be it an outage, extreme weather conditions, perhaps even sickness, companies can have seamless fail-over and managed continuity, redirecting and routing calls to alternative locations or perhaps even business mobile devices. This is because of the soft switch nature of SIP meaning that services can be pre-provisioned to automatically fail-over and divert traffic in a more cost efficient manner.
- Extended Functionality – Many businesses are already using VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) but only internally over the company LAN as a replacement for traditional ‘wired’ telephony. However, SIP Trunks enable the fuller potential of VOIP for communication to be realised outside of the LAN environment beyond simple voice. For example, In addition to VOIP calls, SIP Trunks can also allow companies to deploy UC across their organisation by seamlessly integrating functionality such as presence and Instant Messaging, multimedia conferences, content sharing and other real-time communications services.
So, the big question for many customers is ‘where are you on your journey towards SIP’? The arguments for moving away from traditional analogue and ISDN lines to SIP Trunks would appear to be clear. With a current market trend of 15% – 20% annual growth, more and more businesses seem to be in absolutely no doubt.
For many, the time is right and the journey to SIP starts now!
