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SIP Trunking, SIP Trunking and More SIP Trunking

As Fred and I planned VoiceCon Orlando, we kept adding SIP Trunking sessions. We had just one on this ultra-hot topic in San Francisco last fall, but the opportunities to put great stories onto panels just kept coming at us as we started building the Orlando 2010 program.

We’re keeping Sorell Slaymaker’s SIP Trunking workshop, and Sorell has added an enhancement — he’ll be joined for a portion of the workshop by an end user, Jim Allen of Medtronic, who will give some real-world stories.

And speaking of real-world stories, several end users came forward to offer themselves up as panelists, so we put together a SIP Trunking Case Studies session. This one will feature Steve Blair of the University of Pennsylvania, along with VoiceCon speaking veteran Larry Riba, who’s now with a company called Alpine Access.

Finally, we’ve been fortunate enough to get Lisa Pierce on the program. Lisa has for many years been the foremost analyst studying the enterprise services marketplace, and for the past year or so she’s been doing extensive studies of all aspects of the carriers’ SIP Trunking offers — everything from pricing structures, which are complicated; to SLAs, which are not always easy to secure; and service availability, which seems to be improving. In her session, Lisa’s going to present her findings about SIP Trunking, and then discuss the big picture with carrier representatives, and then with equipment vendor reps.

Then, just for a little extra, we’ve set aside time for a “Coffee Talk” session on SIP Trunking, which Sorell is going to facilitate. Coffee Talks are informal gatherings where you can join in an impromptu conversation with your peers and with the experts who attend the session as well. These are a great opportunity to bring your unique, specific challenges or questions about SIP Trunking, and to gain from the experience that Sorell and your other peers in the room have to share.

After looking at several of the presentations that have already come in, I’m more optimistic than I’ve been in the past that SIP Trunking is something you can actually make serious plans to do in 2010. Our end users have positive feedback; our experts report seeing progress; and the carriers seem to be coming around on the whole thing too.

To give you a sneak peek at some of the SIP Trunking material we’ve got at the show, I’ve put together a “slidecast” that shows you some of the slides that our end users will be presenting. You can access that slidecast here. If you want to see the full descriptions and speaker lists for these SIP Trunking sessions, go to http://www.voicecon.com/program. Lisa’s “Deep Dive” session and Sorell’s workshop are both on Monday, March 22, and the Coffee Talk and Case Studies sessions are both on Wednesday, March 24.

It’s probably been a good 3 or 4 weeks since I declared 2010 the “Year of” something, so let me make my quota: 2010 could well be, if not the “Year of SIP Trunking,” at least the year that SIP Trunking started to get real.

This week’s UC Weekly

Presence: Challenges in Realizing the Promise

Presence has been described as “the dial tone of unified communications.” That characterization reflects the key role that presence capabilities play in enabling new UC modalities by helping to convey information about whether and how people are available for interaction. But there are some significant limitations both in how users conceive of presence capabilities, and in how today’s offerings support the functionality that will be required in the future.

Many people think of presence only as a “buddy list” showing names of colleagues along with an icon indicating availability. The icon selection is generally controlled by the individual, and the information displayed is both limited (as to number of options) and undifferentiated (everyone accessing the presence information sees the same thing). Presence capabilities are available through an enterprise’s PBX or desktop supplier (e.g., IBM or Microsoft), public instant messaging services (e.g., AOL, MSN, Google) or through a small but growing list of business applications providers (e.g., Salesforce.com Chatter).

These presence capabilities provide helpful support for enhanced communications between individuals–what we call UC-User. In fact, in many enterprises today, an internal phone call is rarely made without first checking presence status, and frequently by sending a quick IM to verify availability.

While buddy-list presence is a good start, it’s just that: A start. As many vendor case studies attest, much more significant business impact and demonstrable ROI comes from embedding new communications capabilities within processes and workflows–what we call UC-Business.

The presence requirements needed to support UC-B will, in many situations, go beyond what’s needed for UC-U. Here are a few examples:

* Finding a particular skill will be more important than finding a particular name. And, keeping those skills accurate and up-to-date will be challenging. Today, users update those capabilities in their profiles; in the future, solutions will automatically cull corporate databases and documents for clues to skills.

* Federation between different systems will become critical, as communications are integrated into business processes spanning supply chains or links to customers. The industry is now beginning to enable links between different suppliers’ offerings, but progress is slow, spotty and restricted to inter-domain links. There are even more difficult challenges, somewhat surprisingly, when trying to enable intra-domain links.

* Presence status needs to be expanded and also set automatically, based on inputs from devices or software, location-awareness and other sources. Individuals change state too frequently to keep their own status current, and “available” or “busy” are not adequate for more sophisticated UC applications.

* A mechanism for establishing rules and policies needs to be devised. My availability differs depending not only what I am doing, but also who is trying to reach me and why.

* Finally, there are privacy and security issues that complicate sharing presence information, including both internal policies and external regulatory requirements.

Without progress on these issues, many of which require inter-vendor agreement and cooperation, presence will not be able to fully support the increasingly sophisticated–and valuable–UC applications that could be available.

We will be talking about these important issues at VoiceCon Orlando at a session on Wednesday, March 24, at 3:00 PM. Come join me and a panel of leading suppliers as we discuss issues, trends, and the prospects for progress. Write to me at dvandoren@unicommconsulting.com or add your comments to the discussion here.

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