We did a webinar on SIP Trunking last week, and it shed some light on why this topic has held such durable interest for our audience. Basically, the migration's not nearly done, and the nuances and pitfalls remain plentiful.
We had a terrific presentation from Art Schoeller of Forrester Research, who offered some advice on installations, and also presented some fairly eye-opening data from Forrester surveys:
The first thing you notice on that chart is that the biggest bar represents "Not Interested," though as Art pointed out, that's probably more a reflection of enterprises that simply aren't a good fit for SIP Trunks--they don't have distributed sites, or some such situation. To me it's more intriguing that more than one-quarter of the respondents either don't know if their enterprise has SIP Trunk plans, or are interested but don't yet have any plans to deploy them. These numbers seem to me to suggest that there will be new demand for SIP Trunks several years out from now.
In the meantime, as those red ovals indicate, something less than one-quarter of the respondents are fully engaged with SIP Trunks to one degree or another now.
And among these respondents, attitudes broke down as Art displayed in this slide:
For all four of these points, the blue portions make up a majority who agree with the statement at left. So you have a mixed bag: Respondents are satisfied with availability and performance of services, but have encountered concerns or problems in the areas of security and interoperability.
Our other speaker on the webinar was Tom O'Riordan of Oracle, and though Oracle is now a heavy hitter in SIP Trunking via their acquisition of SBC leader Acme Packet, Tom hastened to point out that he's with the Oracle IT shop, which purchased Acme Packet session border controllers several years before the company acquired Acme.
O'Riordan's proof points on Oracle's SIP Trunking deployment were solid: 55% savings on traffic brought on-net via the SIP Trunks, versus the cost for delivering them as toll traffic, and net savings of $4.5 million a year.
The deployment was not without pain points, as Tom acknowledged: There were various telco issues in the course of consolidating traffic onto OC-12 links for the centralized SIP Trunking deployment; number formatting was a challenge; and the problem of SIP "early offer"--a technical problem that consultant Jim Allen explains here--also arose in Oracle's implementation.
So this Webinar presented pretty much a textbook case on SIP Trunking--why it's so tempting to enterprises, why it can be challenging, and why it's still a big deal. There were something like 70+ questions from the audience, who as usual couldn't get enough of the topic.
Follow Eric Krapf and No Jitter on Twitter and Google+!
@nojitter@EricHKrapf
Eric Krapf on Google+
