Conference calls are an important part of collaboration for many enterprises, and have been for a while. Global companies with multiple branches were among the first to realize the advantages of voice conferencing, and later (when it became available) video conferencing. Conferencing helps cut down on travel cost and streamlines the process of coordinating business activities.

 

Newer technologies available today are bringing the benefits of conferencing within reach of small to medium-size businesses (SMBs). For IT staff with programming skills and service providers, the opportunity to provide new conferencing applications for SMBs is a potentially very rewarding and lucrative possibility.

 

One of the technologies now used to enable conferencing applications is Session Initiation Protocol (News - Alert) (SIP). For enterprises using either a traditional TDM PBX or an IP-PBX (News - Alert), and for hosted service providers, SIP is seen as a key technology for helping to tie organizations together and reduce the costs of conferencing.

 

This topic—how SIP can be used to build conferencing applications—will be addressed at an upcoming session, Building Applications with SIP: Conferencing/Collaboration Solutions, during INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO East 2008. The session is scheduled for Thursday, January 24, 2008, from 1:15 to 2:00 p.m.

 

Presenters Ken Osowski (News - Alert) (vice president of development and marketing at Pactolus Communications Software) and Alan Percy (director of business development at AudioCodes) will outline our SIP can be leveraged for building conferencing and collaboration applications. SIP’s benefits for this task include its ability to deliver scalability and its cost-effectiveness. Also, SIP helps developers avoid restrictive and expensive API creation.

 

To learn more about SIP and its applications, show attendees are encouraged to visit the booths for Pactolus and AudioCodes (News - Alert) (#314 and #823, respectively). Even more information is available on the TMCnet.com Broadband Telephony channel, brought to you by Pactolus.