SIP Expands with Bump from Cisco

by · Published · Updated

For those waiting for that "promised plethora of interoperable third-party applications based on SIP," you’ll be pleased to hear that Cisco has joined the ranks of vendors providing solutions for SIP, a protocol that "opens up the potential for video, data, and presence-awareness apps to be more easily used and shared among SIP-based devices and software" according to InformationWeek.

Mounting customer pressure and the standard’s potential finally convinced Cisco to get behind the Session Initiation Protocol.

The network-equipment vendor has planned a set of announcements that have the Session Initiation Protocol at their core. In addition to a SIP-compliant CallManager 5.0, they include SIP capabilities for Cisco IP phones, presence-awareness software, and multimedia communications software.

The messaging protocol delegates how VoIP phones establish contact and use call waiting, among other things. It will let customers mix and match VoIP products from different vendors.

Cisco’s participation in the SIP protocol can be seen as nothing but a "shot in the arm." While players such as Avaya, Nortel and 3Com have been in the arena since 2004, (Avaya, for example, offers messaging platforms that integrate with both Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes), the absence of Cisco has hurt the growth potential of SIP. This is definitely big news.

Christian Buckley

Christian is a Microsoft Regional Director and M365 Apps & Services MVP, and an award-winning product marketer and technology evangelist, based in Silicon Slopes (Lehi), Utah. He is a startup advisor and investor, and an independent consultant providing fractional marketing and channel development services for Microsoft partners. He hosts the weekly #CollabTalk Podcast, weekly #ProjectFailureFiles series, monthly Guardians of M365 Governance (#GoM365gov) series, and the Microsoft 365 Ask-Me-Anything (#M365AMA) series.