I had the chance to speak with Ken Osowski, VP of Product Management and Marketing at Pactolus regarding the recent Frost & Sullivan statement about SIP becoming a de facto standard for VoIP.

That statement:
According to a recent Frost & Sullivan report, SIP is fast becoming the widely accepted standard for Voice over IP that allows convergent multimedia/multi-modal communication. The author of the report says, “SIP is anticipated to replace the traditional modes of communication, transforming IP communications, creating an alternate communication industry and reducing network elements to mere call-forwarding devices.”

I asked Ken to share his thoughts and his company’s position regarding those comments, and if he agreed or not. And of course, the editor’s favorite question: Why?

Ken: We agree. So far, the industry has focused on voice service delivery via SIP, the consensus – increasingly backed by investments — is that multimedia content will increasingly complement voice with video, and that IM and other real-time communications will be increasingly SIP-based. There are several factors driving SIP-ification, one of the most important being its agility. SIP’s light weight and easy to integrate into client software and devices, and at the same time allows sophisticated services to be brought into the core of the network, so it readily scales up and down.

Greg: So, as SIP is more widely embraced, what are some of the pitfalls that might stand in the way of its proliferation?

Ken: One potential obstacle to SIP’s widespread integration is proprietary peer-to-peer voice services, which today don’t implement it and can potentially impact its acceptance. Applications such as Skype and others use their own signaling mechanisms. In fact Skype embeds their own voice codecs, which eliminates licensing royalties and gives them the flexibility to deploy free peer-to-peer VoIP. I believe that the industry will recognize that widely available free or inexpensive codecs is a good idea and probably here to stay. But instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water, the industry should strive to drive the uniform adoption of a standard signaling protocol. In essence, SIP should be the common denominator for all usage models, sort of a lingua franca. Otherwise, incompatibilities will quickly degrade the advantages of both proprietary peer-to-peer and other VoIP communications. IMS will also drive SIP into wireless handsets, and mobility is incredibly compelling to consumers. In many ways, SIP gives peer-to-peer services the power to evolve to all networks.