The state of SIP trunking in 2017: Survey

If you haven’t already made the move to SIP trunking, you might be wondering if now is the time. But upgrading legacy TDM trunks isn’t the only reason to start thinking SIP. If you’re adopting cloud services or looking ahead to SD-WAN, SIP will play a critical role in making these services run smoothly — not to mention IoT and IPv6.

Some businesses, however, are taking a wait-and-see approach as the industry goes through a cycle of mergers and acquisitions, such as Cisco’s acquisition of BroadSoft.

And some are taking a ‘hybrid’ approach with on-prem call control and SIP trunks for connectivity, according to The SIP Schools’ newly released SIP Survey 2017. Then, they might connect cloud for contact centres, call recording and interactive voice response.

This is the seventh year of the survey, which brings together data from vendors, service providers, integrators, resellers and business users around the world.

The PBX market is still going strong, the report says, and many businesses are choosing to stick with on-prem solutions. But, it’s getting harder to ignore cloud — and therefore harder to ignore SIP.

“A common scenario is where larger companies do not ‘rip and replace’ but simply add more services to their existing communications infrastructure by adopting cloud services slowly and carefully,” says the report. “They cannot be faulted for this approach especially as the market is experiencing a lot of merger/acquisition activity.” Some, however, will rip and replace everything, particularly if they only have a few locations or a small number of users.

The move to cloud-based SIP services seems to be the direction in which companies are moving, says the report — but there are cautionary tales. Without a lack of skilled staff, projects could fail or be abandoned. “It seems quite logical to host certain services online but as ever, what to host online needs to be thought through carefully,” the report says.

SD-WAN is another emerging area where SIP is expected to play a critical role. While there are some deployments, SD-WAN is still a relatively new technology — but one that holds promise to reduce communication costs while improving service.

“SD-WAN services promise a lot of great new features for companies yet it’s clear that reducing communication costs and improving the use of existing links are the most important,” the report says.

While some businesses cite issues with SIP migrations, the key to a successful rollout requires good planning, good support and a good service provider; a lot of issues are “caused by misconfiguration or following incomplete/out-of-date documentation” and “planning and support as well as taking time to test each and every scenario will ensure that SIP implementations will go as smoothly as possible.”

If you don’t have plans in the works, it might be time to at least think about it. At some point, the report warns, it may not be an option. Having a strategy in place will pave the pathway to SIP success.

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