Nortel sees bright future for SIP

Nortel is pushing for enterprises to adopt the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP).

The protocol sets up communication sessions using a range of technologies, with the choice of medium depending on availability. Technologies that can support SIP include internet telephones, mobile phones, instant messaging and video messaging.

SIP also allows for presence awareness, informing an employee seeking to contact a co-worker whether they are available, travelling, on the phone or in a meeting.

Nortel currently offers several products supporting SIP, including its Multimedia Communication Servers and a SIP Multimedia client that runs on a desktop computer through a web browser or on a PDA.

Within a year the company plans to add SIP support to its full line of Communication Servers, as well as IP devices such as phones and conferencing appliances.

"We are seeking hyper interactivity," Peter Finter, Nortel's head of enterprise solutions for EMEA, told vnunet.com at Global Connect in Los Angeles, the annual user conference of the International Nortel Networks Users Association.

With the protocol in place a reader can contact the author of a document simply by clicking on their name. Or a helpdesk agent can quickly find an available skilled engineer to address a specific technical problem.

The technology will increase communication volumes tens to hundreds of times, Finter predicted. To prevent users from getting buried in messages, software agents will manage communications on their behalf.

Apart from launching new SIP-enabled products, Nortel aims to further push the protocol with its new Preferred Software Membership programme that it launched at Global Connect earlier this week.

The programme gives users the option to upgrade their software to the latest version at a fixed rate. By giving users easy access to the latest features, Nortel hopes they will automatically start using them.

This way, Finter said he hoped to deal with the lack of awareness holding back SIP. He also predicted that internet telephony would pave the way as one of the technologies that will be part of the next-generation network.

But Finter acknowledged that some customers could be reluctant to take up the technology. The majority of Nortel users are running non-current software versions because their systems work just fine.

"The world is sceptical of the next big thing. But it's not just Nortel Networks saying this. Everybody is talking about it," Finter noted, pointing to industry partners such as Microsoft and BT.