ߜ SIP Foundry promotes interoperability of SIP prod-
ucts. More information can be found at http://sip
foundry.org.
ߜ SIPit (SIP Interoperability Tests) test events at locations
around the world. More information is available at
http://www.sipit.net.
ߜ SPEERMINT is a new Operations Area working group in
the IETF that is working on peering and operational
issues of SIP. Find out more at http://www.ietf.org/
html.charters/speermint-charter.html
These are just a few of the efforts that are helping to acceler-
ate the already rapidly growing adoption and reliability of
multi-vendor SIP environments.
Multi-Vendor Integration
One of the challenges many enterprises deal with today is the
issue of multi-vendor PBX networking. Traditionally, intercon-
nection has required the use of Q-interface Signaling protocol
(QSIG) to enable support of supplementary services between
systems. This approach provides limited features between
systems, but it doesn’t address the management complexity
caused by the duplication of features and systems, or the
user training complexity due to different user experiences
with each system.
SIP promises to make all of this much easier — with some
caveats, of course! Because it is so open, SIP provides enter-
prises with more choices for user devices and connecting
applications. But although SIP enables basic functionality
between some vendors’ proxies and other vendors’ phones,
for example, it isn’t yet the silver bullet for all interoperability
challenges. Some applications are just too complicated for SIP.
Remember, SIP is designed to simply set up and tear down
calls. Although SIP’s role is expanding and it now does things
for which it wasn’t initially intended, it needs help from other
standards when it comes to
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