By Mariette Johnson Wharton, VP of Marketing
In TMCnet’s VoIP Quality Feature, industry expert Doug Mohney outlines the troubles facing end-to-end SIP transport and the need for what he terms a ” federation service to link enterprises, enabling them to share UC applications, IM directly and securely, and do all that HD voice and video goodness without having to run down to the corporate IT staff and getting them to hand-craft secure connections through the firewall on a one-off basis.” His view is that, “federation would provide a central hub and one-stop-shop for businesses to interoperate at the applications level without having to worry about security.”
Businesses are considering how they can seamlessly integrate UC applications with their partners since Internet service providers (ISPs) do not offer such a service beyond the controlled VoIP framework.
Mohney explains that Avaya, Cisco, Polycom and other producers of HD voice, video, and UC products are now actively seeking third-party solutions to fill the SIP/federation gap to render their offerings more useful. After all, it’s Metcalfe’s law that the more connected communicating devices in a network, the more valuable the device. (What good is a sole video conferencing solution?)
To overcome this problem, Mohney points to Vidtel: “Vidtel’s laser-beam focus is enabling all those enterprise-based video conferencing devices to seamlessly talk to each other. Third-party interchange points are already working to SIP interconnect ISPs; in most respects, Fortune 500 companies operate as ISPs and “get it” a bit better when it comes to the value of SIP-interconnectivity.”