You don't get where you want to go by following the car behind you
Recently, Mike Ely, Aspect's Director of System Engineering questioned Avaya's commitment to SIP, suggesting that customers look for a SIP Interoperability Policy, and that a commitment to SIP is relatively new ground for us (Go ahead, read his blog post. I'll wait....)
Mike has a good point. A policy is a good thing. But a program for interoperability is even better. It's easy to say that customers are welcome to use any SIP compliant device that they so choose. But how do you know that this actually works, and works well? And what about all the other things that are SIP-based, but not actual 'devices', such as call recording applications?
Over 8 years ago, Avaya formalized the DevConnect Program to provide third parties with the technical support, resources and compliance testing programs necessary to deliver innovative joint solutions with a recognized level of interoperability. This extends to providing our customers, channels and support teams with the documentation and configuration information necessary to allow successful implementations.
To paraphrase a comment made at the 2009 VoiceCon show in Orlando, if you know who your members are and what they are doing, you really don't have a developer program. Well, DevConnect has certainly grown to become a true developer program, with over 10,000 companies developing more solutions than we can even imagine. In fact, DevConnect is recognized by leading analysts including Gartner, Canalys and The Yankee Group as an important strength in Avaya's market leadership position. With the addition of Nortel's portfolio, DevConnect supports over 170 different open interfaces across more than 40 products or platforms.
We don't think of SIP as simply a protocol. To Avaya, SIP is the underpinning of an entire architectural model, inclusive of endpoint devices, network interconnections with Service Providers, and for providing new flexibility in connecting the right applications to the right people.
But SIP isn't simple. Scores of technical RFCs abound, with many companies participating in their definition and jockeying for position on how to best tailor SIP specifications to meet their unique business needs or objectives. As a result, just because you have two products that support SIP as a protocol, you can't be guaranteed that they actually interoperate as you would expect until you actually put them together and see what happens.
Avaya has a long history with SIP, with years of SIPiT interoperability testing and the release of comprehensive SIP capabilities as early as 2004. Over the last 7 years we have SIP-enabled all of our applications and introduced a new next generation enterprise-wide architecture in 2009 with Avaya Aura™. For example, our latest innovations in Avaya Aura Session Manager provide adaptation rules that adjust SIP messages between different vendors to ensure effective multi-vendor integration while supporting common enterprise-wide dial-plans and user profiles. SIP is anything but a new idea for us!
Avaya has board-level representation with The SIP Forum in setting standards, and many Avaya experts, such as Dr. Alan Johnston, publish books on the SIP Protocol. We even operate an open, vendor-neutral site for the promotion of SIP-based solutions through The SIP Center.
Our goal throughout has been to provide our customers a smooth migration path from TDM to IP to SIP when and as they are ready to do so. We've never forced customers to adopt SIP as their only protocol or integration option, and we aren't planning to do so now with our roadmap.
We recognize that our customers rely heavily on contact center and Unified Communications applications to run their business, and that there is a cost to migrating fully functioning and useful applications from older, well established APIs such as TSAPI/JTAPI to any other protocol. So we don't force them to do this. Instead we enable them to gain the advantages of SIP, including access to rich presence-based information, by allowing them to gently introduce SIP into their network architectures where and when it makes financial sense to do so for their unique situations.
And all the while, we continue to innovate around SIP-based solutions, such as Avaya Voice Portal and our contact center offerings. And we continue to expand other platforms such as Avaya ACE with web service interfaces, or the Device, Media and Call Control capabilities offered by Avaya Aura Application Enablement Services via Java, .net and XML-based APIs. All of these open interface options provide flexibility to enable a wide range of communication solutions for our customers and partners.
Aspect does get one thing right about the Avaya roadmap. It is helpful to have a navigator to guide you where you want to go. And while I definitely trust the GPS on my dashboard more than my toddler carefully strapped into the backseat (especially since he tends to point out every playground we pass...), I still ask for directions and check my maps whenever I go somewhere new. After all, you'll never get where to where you want to go if you try following the car you see in your rear view mirror.
Comments
Well said & thanks for the link to "the SIP center" what an excellent resource. This needs to be more widely publicized.
Posted 19 Mar 2010 at 04:47 PM