Twilio (News - Alert), the developer of cloud communications software, recently announced availability of the Twilio Elastic SIP Trunking which seeks to provide businesses with SIP platforms that are flexible and scalable.

Twilio recognizes in its announcement that SIP trunking is a technology that has been around for several decades. It has long promised flexibility, but in return it has only generated complexity regarding deployment times and pricing models. The “elastic” nature of Twilio's product tries to change that notion by making SIP easy to deploy and begin using with a host of features that include call recording, instant messaging, and disaster recovery as basic features of the service. It also allows companies to avoid additional connections to PSTN lines in order to gain emergency calling. The cloud-based also allows for dynamic re-routing of calls in the case of local connectivity issues.

Jeff Lawson, the co-founder and CEO of Twilio, commented in his company's announcement about the basic impetus behind the creation of Elastic SIP Trunking.

“Existing SIP trunking providers aren't giving customers the scale, flexibility, and ease of integration advantages that software can provide,” Lawson said. “We built Twilio Elastic SIP Trunking to make it easier for any organization to migrate to cloud-based voice connectivity throughout the world.”

The Twilio communications platform is also extensible by its very nature as an IP-based product. It can leverage WebRTC to make it easy for businesses to complete voice and video calls between their on-premise phones or desktops and mobile devices. With that capability, any device with access to a Web browser is fair game for call completion.

Businesses can also extend the use of their SIP service by creating additional trunks after their initial setups are complete. If a business wants to expand to a new country, for instance, it can use a simple tools to provision an additional trunk with just one click of the mouse. Calling and recording are priced based on per-minute fees that Twilio sets. Following the completion of calls, accounting departments can look at their calling records separated between each tenant, so they can track calling down to a departmental level. Finally, Twilio reports that it backs up its SIP service with a service-level agreement that guarantees 99.95 percent availability.

For any businesses that have found their existing SIP setups to lack built-in features or be less flexible than they had hoped, this latest offering from Twilio could resolve their frustrations. It unlimited capacity for calling/recording can be of benefit to enterprises with a global presence. Likewise, for any company without a similar trunking system but which is growing at a rapid pace, the Elastic SIP Trunking service could fit them well now and long into their growth.