While enterprises have welcomed the cost savings that SIP Trunking enables immediately, there is an entire range of benefits waiting in the wings thanks to the technology, according to a new white paper from the analysts at Ovum.

This “second wave,” as Ovum calls it, offers the promise of integration, centralization, and deployment of UC in enterprise environments. We’ve talked many times here about SIP Trunking as the foundation for UC, and it’s always good to see this kind of validation of our position.

Of course, the “first wave” was driven by the fact that SIP Trunking can reduce communications by eliminating public switched trunks (20-50 percent in many cases). Even if that was all SIP Trunking could deliver, migration could easily be justified. But wait! There’s more!

As Ovum points out in the white paper, there is the ability to integrate and consolidate applications such as email and voice mail, establish redundancy between and among data centers, and flexibly route call traffic, particularly in contact center environments. Once enterprises move to SIP Trunking, there is a “natural progression” toward certain strategies and applications, Ovum says, and offers examples such as:

• Consolidating data centers or other major locations, to reduce operating expenses, capital requirements, and support needs.

• Leveraging SIP Trunking to create audio bridging capabilities from any network location, yielding savings on audio conferencing. (By the way, Sprint has an excellent solution for routing mobile or deskset originated conference calls to a conference bridge on your data network and taking advantage of the reduced costs of VoIP.)

• Optimizing call center traffic, whether the resources are insourced or outsourced, by load balancing, rerouting for disaster recovery, and other techniques.

• Consolidating email services and servers, using a primary site (with backup) and with access given to all users over the converged network.

• Enhancing disaster recovery options, with many redundancy and routing diversity alternatives.

Their final, but perhaps most important, example, is SIP Trunking as a platform for integrating and adding UC services, such as IM, presence, conferencing, collaborative work, and more.