IT EXPO West - SIP Forum aims for interoperability

LOS ANGELES - Marc Robins, managing director of the SIP Forum, said the advocacy and awareness group's mission is evolving now that nearly every service provider and vendor has some sort of SIP solution or offering on the market. Robins said the SIP Forum, which currently has 48 paying members, 5 academic partners and 6,500 individual registrants, is now most concerned with interoperability challenges.

"The first challenge was to get it adopted, and that is battle is over," Robins said. "SIP is everywhere, and the new battle cry is for interoperability, while you must instantly recognize that it's a complex problem."

Robins said that, similar to other standards, SIP has growing pains from vendors designing workable solutions from a common standards document that don't federate.

"We've got 150 RFCs and a similar number of drafts, which is great, because there is a lot of interest and development around the protocol," Robins said. "But it's difficult when companies' build on different solutions, which all are correct but don't interoperate. When Company A uses option 1, and Company B uses option 2, something weird will happen, from outright call failure to bad QoS. What the forum does right now is look for the major pain points."

Robins said SIP trunking, the forum's lead application, is the first to be addressed through the SIP Forum's SIP Connect initiative. He said Version 1.0 has been ratified and that Version 1.1 is being developed currently with a target delivery date of the end of 2009.

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- here's a link [1] to the SIP Forum's IT EXPO announcements