It’s a bit of a long read by online standards, but this article on SIP trunking as a foundation of Unified Communications is well worth your time. Lisa Pierce, president of Strategic Networks Group, wrote it for No Jitter, and it really does capture the important role of SIP trunking en route to the Promised Land of UC.

Lisa and I, by the way, will be speaking together in a technology session at VoiceCon on March 22. The topic is “SIP Trunking: Who’s Offering What? – Part 1,” and the session is at 9 a.m. in the Sun A Room of the Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center in Orlando, the site of this year’s VoiceCon. If you’re going to the show, put this session your calendar; it would be a great way to start off the first day of the conference.

As Lisa mentions in her NoJitter article – and I’m sure she’ll talk about this in our session – for companies with multiple locations, UC’s benefits can really only be unlocked through an all-IP infrastructure. And SIP trunks serve as the bridge between enterprise IP telephony infrastructures and provider IP networks, and thus the path to extend UC throughout the organization.

One area where I disagree with Lisa, and this will no doubt come up in our session too, is that she doesn’t believe SIP trunking services are the equal of legacy services in terms of functionality and reliability. She recommends building in a degree of resiliency into the SIP-enabled WAN architectures. I would agree with resiliency – that’s always a good idea, whatever your network architecture – but IMHO, SIP trunking is more than ready for prime time. There are a lot of happy Sprint SIP trunking customers, with smooth-running and efficient networks to prove that point.

I’ll post my thoughts on the session after it wraps up, but if you will be in Orlando and want the unfiltered version, come see us. We’ll save a chair for you.  Or stop by the Sprint booth #617 and we can chat about SIP Trunking and review the demonstrations prepared for the show.