SIP trunking can provide significant savings and flexibility to organizations looking for affordable, reliable phone service. Like UCaaS, SIP uses Internet protocols to make phone calls, but unlike VoIP it also handles other types of media, such as video and instant messaging.
With the introduction of software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) solutions, SIP is poised to deliver even more flexibility and scalability, allowing organizations to deploy and expand their unified communications solutions, scale their services, and obtain network insights to help optimize their communications investments.
Here are five benefits organizations should consider as they modernize their communications networks:
1. Total Cost of Ownership -- Migrating to a SIP solution can significantly reduce costs by allowing organizations to centralize the deployment and management of their telecommunications networks. This eliminates the need to travel to multiple sites for deployment, management, and maintenance. As a result, businesses can reduce their TCO and apply savings to other initiatives.
2. Design Flexibility -- With SIP, organizations can manage their communications networks to suit their needs. SIP solutions are either centralized or distributed, which determines how calls are routed. In distributed environments, each site has its own SIP trunk to connect to the public network while in a centralized setting calls are routed through the WAN. This isn't possible in many traditional ISDN Primary Rate Interface (PRI) environments.
3. Business Continuity -- The ability to continue operating in the event of an outage or failure is crucial in today's businesses. SIP trunking delivers multiple business continuity options:
4. Network Consolidation -- With time-division multiplexing (TDM), trunks provide a physical path to the public telephone network, but thanks to SIP pooling, it's possible to consolidate networks for call path efficiency. Since SIP uses IP connections, organizations can share call paths across multiple IP connections. It is also possible to program the PBX to support all telephone numbers centrally with supported E911 services without having hardware or network connections deployed at each location.
5. Network Insights -- Paired with SD-WAN, SIP is even more attractive as organizations take steps to gain the agility they need to compete in today's fast-paced markets. SD-WAN delivers administrators insights on the performance of network functions, including voice, video, and messaging. Those insights can be turned into actions to optimize performance and the customer experience.
It's the Future
SIP is on its way to replace ISDN PRI. Even as PBX shipments decline worldwide, IP PBX shipments continue to grow. Thanks to SD-WAN and network functions virtualization, on-premises solutions will change dramatically, allowing organizations to use their SIP more efficiently and add new functionality.
