VoIP Quality Feature

Due to a combination of factors, the concept of enterprise federation – enabling businesses to exchange IP packets directly – is on the upswing once again.

Enterprise federation got its first shot at popularity about a decade ago when it became clear that Internet service providers weren’t interested in providing end-to-end SIP transport for anything other than vanilla VoIP. ISPs couldn’t figure out how to make a buck off the practice, so rich media applications such as HD voice and video were a non-starter outside of an enterprise firewall; maybe within an individual ISP’s reach if you were lucky. 

Enter start-up company Tello, with a Big Picture vision of providing a federation service to link enterprises, enabling them to share UC applications, IM directly and securely, and do all that HD voice and video goodness without having to run down to the corporate IT staff and getting them to hand-craft secure connections through the firewall on a one-off basis. Federation would provide a central hub and one-stop-shop for businesses to interoperate at the applications level without having to worry about security. 

It was a good idea in theory but Tello was ahead of its time. Enterprises were just wrapping their heads around the implications of vanilla VoIP, so making the leap to rich media apps was like asking them to jump to warp speed when they were mastering basic rocketry. In addition, UC applications, HD voice gear, and video conferencing gear was all bright shiny new and expensive – few people had it and those that did were just rolling it out.

Turn the dial on the time machine to “today” and it’s a much different story. A substantial base of businesses now have VoIP and a good number of them are HD voice capable or are already running HD voice internally. A spike in oil prices, green concerns, and the recession of 2008-2009 combine to drive the popularity of a ranging of videoconferencing solutions ranging from desktop cams to high-end telepresence suites. Finally, some businesses are starting to consider how they might take their existing UC applications and use them in a seamless fashion with their partners. 

But service providers still don’t exchange SIP packets outside a highly controlled framework of VoIP due to security and the whole “Customers aren‘t asking for it…how do we monetize it?” party line. 

See why federation might be back in vogue? 

Avaya, Cisco, Polycom (News - Alert) and other makers of HD voice, video, and UC products are now actively seeking third-party solutions to fill the SIP/federation gap. The reasoning why is twofold and simple. First, many companies have invested a lot of money into higher-level solutions – think about the price tag (News - Alert) on a top-end telepresence solution. Fortune 500 companies have invited a ton of money into videoconferencing but they can’t easily and seamlessly “call” each other so vendors are left with trying to find a solution to make their products more useful. 

Secondly, Polycom and others in the HD voice world are preaching a variant of Medcalf’s Law, where the value of the network increases in proportion to the total number of devices that can communicate with each other. A couple thousand HD voice devices within an enterprise delivers efficiency for internal communication; being able to have hundreds of thousands of HD voice endpoints among thousands of businesses results in benefits for everyone due to improved communication. 

Companies to watch in the born-again federation space are video-anchored Vidtel and third-party interconnection services such as XConnect (News - Alert). Vidtel’s laser-beam focus is enabling all those enterprise-based video conferencing devices to seamlessly talk to each other. Third-party interchange points are already working to SIP interconnect ISPs; in most respects, Fortune 500 companies operate as ISPs and “get it” a bit better when it comes to the value of SIP-interconnectivity.