IP Telephony

Covergence (News - Alert) is the creator of Covergence Session Manager, the industry's first session border controller specifically designed to address the unique requirements of the VoIP access edge. Serving customers such as Tier 1, 2, and 3 service providers and large enterprises, the core of Covergence’s development and leadership team has spent their careers working in the network equipment industry at companies such as Shiva, Cascade, Aptis, Bay Networks, Nortel (News - Alert), Tiburon Networks and other leading organizations.

 

 

RW: Enterprises are looking to adopt architectures that will link together their multi-vendor islands of VoIP and deploy SIP trunking to link to the PSTN. In some cases these architectures are enterprise versions of IMS, where the PBX is physically decoupled from the handset (or soft client), loses its primacy in call routing and becomes a feature server somewhere in the cloud. In place of the PBX governing call routing, we are seeing a requirement for SIP-based call routing engines which are presence-aware and integrate with enterprise applications.

 

Web Services are becoming a favored tool to integrate real-time communications into business processes.

 

Call centers are rapidly moving away from POTS as a means to save money; large call centers can save millions of dollars annually by avoiding take-back-and-transfer charges when calls are transferred from IVRs to live agents.

 

The trend of a shift in value from hardware to software continues, as specialized hardware gives way to industry-standard servers. Customers are particularly interested in standardizing on blade technology such as IBM Intel-based BladeCenter and ATCA servers.

 

RW: We were gratified with the take-up of our Covergence Session Manger product, as large enterprises finally started moving their voice infrastructure to SIP. 

 

RW: We expect the enterprise adoption of SIP to strengthen, as service providers offer more functionally complete and cost-competitive SIP trunking services.

 

RW: SIP, SIMPLE and SOAP. These have enabled the integration of systems from diverse vendors as never before, at first for simple POTS replacement but increasingly to add real-time communications to all kinds of applications.

RW: While Skype has somewhat legitimized P2P and “Over The Top” as valid approaches to communications, what is more interesting in the style of communication and collaboration that it has enabled. However, its impact is severely limited by the fact that it is a closed system.

 

RW: Apple won’t — they’re apparently more interested in the walled-garden approach and extracting a percentage of call revenues through exclusive relationships with wireless carriers. 

 

Google perhaps gets credit for spurring Verizon (News - Alert) Wireless to open their network, which will allow third-party developers to build innovative applications. While some of these applications will be aimed at consumers, there is also the potential for enterprises to hook mobile devices into their networks using open protocols on top of the wireless carrier’s services. We may finally see some meaningful fixed-mobile convergence, and flush Voice over WiFi down the toilet of history.

 

We have yet to see how far Microsoft will open up Office Communication Server to third-party applications and multi-vendor integration. Enterprises who have bought into ASP.NET (News - Alert) will of course have an easier time of it than those who have chosen J2EE for their integration architecture.

 

RW: While customers will continue to deploy Covergence Session Manager to secure real-time communications in both enterprise and service provider networks, we expect an increasing emphasis on integrating call management with enterprise applications using Web Services, and on handling calls based on presence status and centralized policy definitions.

 

RW: While it is a competitive world out there, one of our biggest challenges is in cutting through the confusion over the best way to integrate applications with real-time communications, to integrate PBX and IM systems from different vendors, and pick the right blend of carrier services and in-house infrastructure.

 

RW: They will learn the strategies enterprise customers are using to integrate their various systems using a combination of SIP and Web services.

 

RW: Enterprise communications architects and product managers for service providers selling to the enterprise.

 

RW: Insight into what customers are putting into their RFPs, and how Covergence is helping them integrate real-time communications into their business applications.

 

RW: We will see application service providers adding real-time communications to their services, and, conversely, communications service providers providing hosted application support.

RW: Sorry, you haven’t signed our NDA. J