On one fundamental level, telephone systems still perform the same basic function they have for many, many decades: enable people to carry on voice conversations without having to be in the same room. But, in many other ways, today’s telephone systems are not your grandfather’s voice conversation enablers.
IPitomy
Smarter Business Communications
The market for voice services has changed, with the recent introduction of VoIP phone systes. A big part of that change has to do with a relatively new industry-standard protocol: Session Initiation Protocol, or SIP. First developed in 1996, SIP is used in telephone systems to create, modify and terminate sessions between callers.
Business continuity is on the minds of many company managers these days. Likely, this is for two reasons. One is the increasing trend toward doing business on a global stage—the need to serve customers in the same city and halfway across the world with the same level of responsiveness.
Good news for companies that VoIP phone systems and related products: Voice over IP growth continues. Yankee Group recently examined the consumer VoIP service market, and found that adoption of this new telephony technology experienced healthy growth during 2006.
Microsoft’s launch this week of its Office Communication Server 2007 is a significant event in the IP communications/unified communications market. The new offering puts Microsoft in competition with some companies, but complements the offerings of others.