The SIP Forum announced the completion of a new initiative to streamline how service providers and their enterprise customers leverage interactive IP communications services and solutions. Developed by The SIP Forum's Technical Work Group, this new industry recommendation, termed SIPconnect, is designed to directly tie enterprise customers to VoIP service providers using an end-to-end IP connection.

SIPconnect provides detailed instructions and architecture specifications to deliver direct SIP connectivity with VoIP service providers to ensure consistent quality-of-service, low cost and full-featured telephony for SIP-based VoIP calls.

"Today, calls originating from a SIP-based enterprise VoIP network are converted to circuit-switched networks and in many cases converted back to VoIP again when routed onward," said Jay Batson, managing director and chairman of the SIP Forum. "Clearly, this is not an ideal situation as it adversely effects quality and limits the telephony/multimedia features that service providers can offer to VoIP-enabled enterprises."

The SIPconnect draft identifies the functionalities required to create the requisite SIP connectivity. Based on IETF SIP building blocks, the SIPconnect draft addresses architecture specifications and SIP methods, including usage profiles and implementation instructions. Additional areas covered include security, multimedia management, fax/modem transmissions, echo cancellation, DTMF tones, quality-of-service, and NAT traversal.

"VoIP trunking services offer enterprises a tremendous opportunity to drive down telecom costs," said Irwin Lazar, principal analyst and program director, Collaboration and Convergence at Nemertes Research. "This recommendation from the SIP Forum fills a standards hole that will enable vendors and service providers to respond to enterprises clamoring for these savings."

The SIPconnect initiative has already been embraced by key industry players such as Avaya, Cbeyond and Cisco Systems. Companies that contributed to drafting SIPconnect's detailed instructions and architecture specifications include: Acme Packet, Avaya, Broadsoft, Cbeyond, Cisco Systems, Inter-Tel, Mitel Networks, NeuStar, Nortel Networks, RADVISION, Siemens AG, SIP Edge LLC, Pulver.com, Talkswitch, Tello Corp., Xit Telecom and others, according to Batson. "SIPconnect represents a great milestone for the industry, and will further the progress of bridging the islands of SIP networks," he said.

"Acme Packet's support of SIPconnect grew out of our session border controller's role in securely bridging enterprise and service provider networks," said Seamus Hourihan, vice president of marketing and product management for Acme Packet. "This specification will bring service providers and their enterprise customers the benefits of reduced costs, better call quality and the feature richness of VoIP connections."

"SIPconnect is a natural extension to Avaya's SIP trunking offer," said Anwar Siddiqui, technical manager at Avaya's office of the CTO. "We support SIPconnect's capability to help enterprise customers peer with enterprises, and VoIP service providers to provide additional cost savings."

"At BroadSoft, we see SIP trunking making significant gains as enterprises adopt this avenue to IP communications," said Scott Wharton, vice president of marketing for BroadSoft. "Our commitment to this standards-based approach is evident in our deployment with numerous IP PBXs."

"We are huge proponents of the new SIP Forum recommendation as it ensures a consistent, high quality-of-service that is cost-effective for our customers," said Chris Gatch, chief technology officer at Cbeyond. "Additionally, we have already begun to see the benefits of the SIP Forum's work through the increased compatibility of IP PBXs with our BeyondVoice(TM) with SIPconnect service, an integrated package of voice, mobile and broadband services that we offer to our small business customers."