SIP MARKET REPORT
“The fact that 2020 marks the start of the year where new orders for ISDN will no longer be taken
ahead of the 2025 ISDN cut off point, simply acts as another reminder of the inevitable move
towards ISDN switch off in 2025.” Paul Wakefield, SIP Trunking Product Manager - Gamma
SIP and Microsoft Teams
The SIP market has seen a uptick in activity over the last two
years as a result of Microsoft’s decision to offer a Direct Routing
option with Teams. The Channel had been circling this opportunity
with limited success due to Microsoft’s Calling Plan price point. In
the last six months the proposition has grown wings as Service
Providers come to market with their own offerings. For those that
offer hosted platforms, NOT having a Teams integration is a serious
faux pas in 2020. The demand for Teams (Microsoft’s fastest
growing product ever) has been unprecedented and the fact that
Microsoft haven’t, or rather can’t, compete on voice is a serious
opportunity. SIP providers are revamping their propositions to
target those that want Teams with voice at a sensible price point.
numbers.”
e opportunity is clear. It
is estimated there are still 2
million businesses operating
their telephone system over
ISDN in the UK alone, this
year communications are
expected to account for 36%
of IT budgets, at a global
cost of $3,878 billion. Since
the Covid-19 virus has sent
the world into lockdown the
likelihood that these numbers
will increase is high. Given
Dom Black’s comments
regarding businesses potentially
leapfrogging SIP and going
straight to cloud the global
situation could accelerate that
trend.
Wakeeld commented, “In
terms of ‘catalysts for change’, we
are in the midst of a lockdown
resulting from the Coronavirus,
so in terms of impact to
businesses, I would suggest
this will be game changing
in how businesses view their
communications infrastructure
in the future and, of all the
above, business continuity may
be perceived a higher value as we
move towards 2025.”
What is next for SIP?
SIP continues to be a popular
>
What do the analysts say?
Cavell Group has been predicting the rise of a SIP Application
market where providers would start to deliver applications over SIP.
This could enable applications like mobile apps, inbound services,
and call recording which a customer’s legacy PBX couldn’t deliver
whilst enabled by SIP. Cavell also believes this could improve the
inconsistent experiences faced by customers with multiple PBXs
not always in a position to
adopt VoIP in one go but need
to stage a rollout. Experience
tells us that most business
will move during a major tech
refresh, however SIP Trunks
can facilitate earlier adoption
in areas of the business that
can’t wait for the main project.
A good example was when
Skype for Business started to be
adopted and more recently MS
Teams.
I saw customers with
traditional PBXs, in long term
contracts, able to use SIP
trunks to take advantage of the
emerging technology to make
calls and get the benets of full
collaboration.
ere is a huge amount
of benets over ISDN, these
include Redundancy, ability to
redirect, overows to voicemail,
peering SIP registration
multiple options
In today’s climate the ability
redirect call trac during the
pandemic has been business
saving. SIP Trunks can be
used to re-route call trac, to
ensure business community to
mobiles or other oces, and
most importantly home oce
locations!”
SIP – still a steppingstone?
Hosted voice has been a prime
opportunity for the Channel
of late as the exibility and
cost savings have been hard
for businesses to ignore. SIP
has long been sold as the ideal
steppingstone to going hosted,
but what are we seeing now that
going ‘full cloud’ is a feasible
choice given the advances in
infrastructure and connection
speeds?
On a recent episode of
Comms Business Live, Dom
Black, Head of Research at
Cavell Group commented
“What we’ve seen on the hosted
VoIP numbers is they have
been increasing year-on-year
and we have had steady growth
as people move their PBX’s to
the cloud. What we’ve seen on
the SIP side however is a lot of
service providers have stopped
selling SIP because they don’t
see long term value in this going
forward. ey are seeing hosted
as the way they can increase
revenue and increase margins
from their customers. A lot of
people are saying they see SIP
as a steppingstone and so are
asking if they need to take that
step or rather migrate their
whole network infrastructure
and voice infrastructure and
move it to cloud in one fell
swoop. We’ve seen the SIP
numbers slow down a little
bit when we thought at this
point they would be picking up
because people would be selling
more and hitting the ISDN
SIP drivers
• Ease of install and flexibility of trunks
• Value in comparison to ISDN
• Disaster recovery and business continuity
• Enablement of doing national and international business
• Interoperability with existing systems
• “Free” calls
Dom Black, Head of Research at Cavell Group
www.commsbusiness.co.uk May 2020 | Comms Business Magazine | 31
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