January 28, 2012

TMCnet's SIP Trunking Week in Review

By David Sims
TMCnet Contributing Editor

This past week TMC (News - Alert) interviewed Charles Studt, vice president of product management at IntelePeer (News - Alert), as one of the leading lights in the industry, for his thoughts about 2011 and what’s in store for the year ahead.

TMC: What was your company's greatest achievement in 2011?

Studt: Our greatest achievement stems from our continued execution through the growth and robustness of our business overall and specifically, expanding our customer base and offerings in SIP trunking services. We were able to grow our business 76 percent in 2009 and 46 percent in 2010 despite the recession.

Our growth has been driven largely by innovation, which we view as a constant process. Most importantly, we've executed across all of our service lines and business units, particularly through our SIP trunking services, where we've seen the industry evolve with the major players like Avaya, Microsoft, and Cisco (News - Alert).

TMC also spoke with Mehmet Balos, chief marketing officer at GENBAND about his thoughts about 2011.

TMC: What was your company’s greatest achievement in 2011?

Balos: Two major milestones stand out in 2011. First, GENBAND successfully completed the integration of Nortel’s (News - Alert) IP Switching assets, which was the company’s largest acquisition in its history. The acquisition not only changed GENBAND but also changed the global telecom landscape.

By acquiring Nortel CVAS and successfully integrating its products into GENBAND’s portfolio, we preserved many years of respected research and development and provided continuity for an enormous installed base, enabling carrier customers to cost effectively continue growth and delivery of services to global customer bases. At the core of this integration emerged the GENBAND GENiUS platform, which was the second major milestone of 2011.

And TMC noted that the humble predictive dialer is about to get a facelift. The dialer, a staple of outbound telemarketing for decades, is oft-maligned, but still used for one basic reason – it works. Now, it's getting a bit of a new image, at least on the technological side.

UK-based managed SIP services company Tpad announced its own version of the predictive dialer, but Tpad’s is based on the company’s own SIP trunking technology, which is expected to bring with it a number of advantages over traditional predictive dialers, or even those based on Internet protocol (IP).

Simon Jones, Tpad's sales director, said, “Although SIP technology is based mainly on the convergence of data and voice through Internet connectivity; we would like to explain that the use of SIP can indeed be expanded to suit the needs of clients.”

The advantages of a predictive dialer built on SIP trunking are many, said Jones.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO East 2012, taking place Jan. 31-Feb. 3 2012, in Miami, FL. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. For more information on registering for ITEXPO registration click here.

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David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Rich Steeves