SIP Trunking Is Key to Accelerating Unified Communications Deployments

Organizations have torn down their corporate walls and are moving toward Yankee Group's vision of becoming an Anywhere Enterprise. That is a global company that is networked together and comprises a variety of constituents. Employees, partners, suppliers and customers are all important components of an Anywhere Enterprise for virtually anytime, virtually anywhere access to people and information. And their need to communicate faster and more collaboratively over a variety of devices or mediums is greater than ever. Over time, organizations have deployed a myriad of communications tools and devices to help people communicate better with one another. These include telephony systems, conferencing, collaboration tools and e-mail. Although these devices address the need for faster communications, few of them are linked together. This creates a manageability headache for the worker and prohibits the organization from reaching its full potential. To achieve their full potential, organizations require the ability to communicate and collaborate better. Competitive advantage is no longer about any single person or core capability. The entire extended enterprise and the ability of each of its constituents to communicate and collaborate with other in real time forms the basis of competitive advantage today. This presents a challenge for workers to reach more people in shorter periods of time with the right information at their fingertips. Organizations have turned to unified communications (UC) as a method of meeting this challenge. Those UC enterprise customers with carriers who have deployed IP multimedia subsystems (IMS) services will find additional savings in call routing and PSTN access reduction. Also, UC is now the vehicle upon which integrated wireless solutions can attach. Up to this point, wireless integration was often a stand-alone and sometimes expensive adjunct to an IP PBX.