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TMCnet’s recent webinar “The Benefits of SIP Communications for Small and Medium Businesses in the Pure IP - Open Source Environment,” featuring Steven L. Greiwe, Panasonic ASM (News - Alert) Eastern Region, explored how the powerful combination of SIP with Open Source communications and collaboration options is changing the landscape in the small to medium business (SMB) markets and creating sustainable competitive advantage. Highlighted in a fast-paced, insight-packed session were:

-          SIP and Open Source – how they work

-          Advantages of an Open Source approach

-          Evaluating if SIP and Open Source are right for your business or organization

-           Get starting with SIP-based Open Source solutions

Greiwe started with a provocative statement: “SIP communications via Open Source combines the technological innovations of application hardware and the power of the network to enable advanced capabilities that improve efficiency and reduce cost for tens of thousands of SMBs around the world…..without the need to purchase expensive vendor products, services, and licenses own a communications platform. The intelligence of the platform is designed by you and supported by many for free.”

He then went on to discuss the ease-of-use of getting started, and the long list of tangible benefits of SIP/Open Source solutions:

-          Reduced Costs:   This means hardware, software, licensing costs, and overall IT and voice communications expenses. In addition, with open solutions you pay only for what you use

-          Scalability

-          Posted enhancements done by a community forum made up of experts from various fields 

-          Enhanced linkage with other systems without vendor constraints on code modification

-          Bugs in Open Source software also tend to get fixed immediately

-          Ease of implementation

-          Skilled and proven approaches to solving problems

-          Creation of an even playing field for SMBs with larger competitors

In other words, a freedom of what used to be called the “tyranny of proprietary architectures” based on tools and APIs that are SMB friendly. 

Projected savings from putting in SIP End Points and connecting them via pure IP with Open Source environments on various servers (including those hosted in the cloud) range from 40 to 60 percent. This does not include a calculation of the additional value-added from new functionality.

Greiwe observed that the installed base of a broad swath of legacy SMB communications devices and capabilities are targets for the smart SMB to consider displacing. The top four listed included:

-          Key System or PBX (News - Alert) replacement

-          Voicemail server

-          Conferencing server

-          Call Center ACD queue

Pondering this list and the rest of the items on it presented in the webinar, leads to interesting questions about the rate of transformation taking place in the technology serving the SMB market. It also raise issues about the rate at which new solutions are likely to be adopted by SMBs to correctly align the way in which they interact internally, with partners and particularly customers in a very dynamic and converging world with significant economic challenges.

If you are an SMB, regardless of your size or even technical sophistication, you have probably watched what is going on in the way the world of communications and collaboration is being literally revolutionized and asking: “Is SIP/Open Source for me, and where do I turn and what do I need to know about how to get started?

Greiwe says doing your homework on SIP and Open Source is critical. He cites   www.asterisk.org, www.sip-communicator.org, www.voip-info.org, and www.sipfoundry.org as places to get educated.   For the uninitiated, Asterisk is a complete PBX solution developed by a community of full time developers and several part time contributors. The SIPfoundry (News - Alert) is the open source community behind a number of SIP-based open source VoIP projects. Some of their best known projects include sipX and reSIProcate (a complete SIP protocol stack for use in application development).

Visit TMC’s webinar archive to download the webinar and register today for the next TMCnet.com series of Panasonic’s (News - Alert) webinars, “Exceeding Expectations - The Power of SIP Communications for Small and Medium Sized Businesses” (to be held Tuesday, Oct. 4, at 2 p.m. EST/11 a.m. PST).

Peter Bernstein is a technology industry veteran, having worked in multiple capacities with several of the industry's biggest brands, including Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent, Telcordia, HP, Siemens, Nortel (News - Alert), France Telecom, and others, and having served on the Advisory Boards of 15 technology startups. To read more of Peter's work, please visit his columnist page.