SIP trunking 101

Hi, my name is Ken Kuenzel, the Founder and CTO of Covergence. I'm here today to talk to you about SIP Trunking 101. One of the things we've seen over the last four or five years is that our enterprise partners have deployed various voice, IM, and video systems as islands of collaboration inside their networks.

As these islands have grown, they've decided that they need to connect these things. In order to connect these, what they're deploying is a technology called SIP Trunks. SIP Trunks are used to connect various collaboration systems within the enterprise network and with Telco partners out there that have displaced TDM cost.

After the islands have been connected, the next most important thing is security needs to be maintained. Security in these networks used to happen because these islands were truly islands and they never could collaborate before. Now that they can talk in the networks, it's important that things going on over these network connections have the same level of security that they used to have when they were islands. No data can move between connections that shouldn't be moving between connections and all the connections need to be secure. Control becomes very important as well.

A voice system that needs to collaborate with a TDM partner or a voice system that needs to make a call to a video system needs to be able to route a call effectively and in a timely fashion so the collaboration works with the same level of quality that they used to get when they were connecting directly to a TDM system or directly within that system.

After we've controlled the systems, we need to be able to manage them. As you deploy these technologies, like any other technology on your IP network, voice does not become an application any more, it's really another IP application that's running on the WAN. To control these systems people are using things like IBM's Tivoli and CA Interscope to manage what's going on over these things to trap, alert and alarm systems that are going on so they can tell as collaboration moves from point to point in the system, they can actually manage and see how people are talking and communicating.

After we've managed the systems, they do break down. What will happen in a system is a line will go down, an IM system will go down, a video system will go, and part of deploying a SIP Trunk is your ability to fault isolate quickly and be able to reroute around a call. If a call that used to come from a Telco partner to an IM system, it can now be rerouted through the network to still have the same level of connectivity and calls can complete.

After we've effectively deployed all of our systems and we've effectively connected, secured, controlled and managed the systems, you end up with some large benefits. What you'll see is your costs go down because you're now peering over IP as opposed to TDM inside the networks and your productivity goes up. Islands that previously weren't able to communicate to each other can now quickly and effectively communicate, and collaboration amongst all your employees will be enhanced.