It was in 1998 when the first vendors began promoting the promise of IP Telephony to the enterprise. It is only now, almost ten years later that enterprises can enjoy the true benefits of IP Telephony, by creating truly standards-based, best-of-breed IP telephony systems, using the SIP protocol.

When IP Telephony was first introduced, it included the concept of decoupling the PBX software, the phones, the line cards, the trunk connections, and the telephony applications. IP was the protocol selected to connect them together, providing location independence, easy adds moves and changes and lower cost of ownership.
While attempting to keep the full system revenue to themselves, all traditional and new IP telephony vendors have done their utmost to maintain the complete IP telephony system non-standard. Although it was based on Ethernet and IP as the layer 2 and layer 3 protocols, and on RTP as the voice media protocol, the most significant protocol, which is the signaling protocol between the system components, has remained non-standard. This method actually created a barrier for enterprise customers, thereby not allowing them to benefit from one of the most important potential advancements of IP Telephony – lower capital expenses and ongoing spending by keeping up to date with product advances in the industry

Over time, SIP has emerged as the de-facto signaling standard for VoIP - first in the Service Provider space, and then in the Enterprise area. Almost all IP telephony vendors currently support SIP as an alternative to their proprietary protocol, allowing for the first time to create a true best-of-breed IP telephony implementation in the enterprise.

Leading enterprise IP telephony vendors, such as Cisco, Nortel, Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson, as well as open-source implementations such as Asterisk, today support SIP in parallel to the existing proprietary protocol. In addition, Microsoft’s entrance into the enterprise telephony world is based on the native support of SIP in their messaging and real time communication platforms: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007.

AudioCodes historical approach of supporting all industry standard signaling protocols, and focus on interoperability with leading industry vendors now pays off for Systems Integrators and end-users: AudioCodes media gateways support easy integration with leading IP telephony vendors, using SIP as the chosen protocol, and enabling System Integrators and end customers to build a true best-of-breed IP telephony network, with lower capital expenses and reduced cost of ownership.

An end customer can now build an IP telephony system from his selection of vendors, for example: Nortel CS-1000 as the Call control platform, IP Phones from Polycom, a Mediant™ 1000 media gateway from AudioCodes for connecting the E1/T1 trunks and existing FXS analog phones and faxes, and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 as the Unified Messaging platform. All of these components have been pre-certified by the vendors into a cohesive solution, tested together, and are fully interoperable – out of the box.

The new world of best-of-breed enterprise IP-Telephony creates a great opportunity for System Integrators and end customers, allowing them to pick and choose the right components for their solution from multiple vendors, saving costs and keeping their IP Telephony networks open to new components and applications in the future.

For more information about AudioCodes Enterprise IP Telephony partners, please visit our PBX & IP-PBX Partners Page.