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Nobody argues that the adoption of Session Initiation Protocol (News - Alert) Trunks among enterprises has accelerated in recent years. That much is clear to all in the industry.

And there isn’t even much debate about why it’s happening -- according to a good recent case study from Clarus titled “Clarus Services: SIP Trunk Business Readiness Verification,” the primary driver of SIP adoption by enterprises is “the opportunity to save costs versus alternative technologies such as Primary Rate Interface (PRI) subscriptions and related PSTN gateways and components.”

But what’s not commonly understood is how the cost savings can be lost if the enterprises using it don’t consider the risks involved and mitigate them properly.

The Clarus study identifies five specific risks enterprises need to watch out for: Verifying interoperability with different service providers, ensuring all Direct Inward Dial lines are ported correctly to the SIP Trunks from traditional PRIs, ensuring Call Admission Control is working as expected, mitigating Voice Quality/Quality of Service issues and addressing security concerns, such as a denial of service attack.

Clarus Systems (News - Alert) has considerable expertise in the area, having developed a SIP trunk business readiness verification service to detect and mitigate these risks, resolving issues during the migration process, before these issues can impact end users.

The study gives a case study as an example.

The company, one of Clarus’s clients, is a global retail and investment bank, with “hundreds of bank branches throughout the US and offices across the globe.” So we’re talking a sizeable operation, quite the challenge. The bank was migrating to SIP trunks and wanted Clarus to perform a SIP trunk business readiness verification.

Specifically, they wanted to know whether the SIP trunk “delivered all the services specified by the bank, whether the SIP trunk could support the total call capacity required and what would occur if the SIP trunk capacity was exceeded by call activity.”

Critical business questions all -- and not particularly easy to find reliable answers to.

Clarus is able to capture all required data related to call flows, traffic patterns, alerts and alarms, and failure scenarios. This lets engineering and operations teams feel confident in their ability to operate and maintain the conversion of services to SIP in a production setting.

Clarus performed a detailed series of verification tests. In the end, they were able to advise the bank on the capacities for each individual network elements, network element load balancing for each traffic mix, network element failover and redundancy configurations and the service routing for both primary and secondary route paths

Clarus also identified several issues during the testing, including call disconnects resulting from packet loss or drops, blocked calls due to incorrect routing or capacity for call which route between multiple carrier switches / inter-switch trunk capacity, and misrouted calls, ones that are not routed as required once call capacity is exceeded.

Bottom line, without Clarus’ involvement, “the migration to SIP would have resulted in blocked calls, dropped calls and misrouted calls, with high impact to end users including the bank’s customers trying to reach them on inbound DID lines,” according to Clarus officials.

Earlier this month TMC’s (News - Alert) Juliana Kenny wrote that Clarus has been ramping up its global efforts in VoIP management, involving expansive deployments and VoIP infrastructure migrations and upgrades. Offering a remote service using U.S.-based resources to test global VoIP phone deployments, Clarus is broadening its horizons in the Asian Pacific, Latin American, and EMEA regions.

Dom Molloy, director of services for Clarus Systems, stated in an interview, “We have introduced a couple of new services that we’re getting some traction on. Additionally we’re seeing a wider and heavier adoption of services that we already offer.”