“Only recently has the role of voice quality monitor and demarcation been fully recognized”
By Alan Percy, Senior Director of Marketing, AudioCodes
SIP Trunking is widely recognized as an alternative to legacy PRI circuits, delivering voice services to businesses over IP at reduced costs with greater flexibility. Partners are also seeing opportunities to resell SIP Trunking to their business customers, creating a revenue stream and earning residual commissions.
However, delivering and maintaining voice quality that matches the expectations of businesses migrating from PRI circuits is critical to success. Having a clear point of demarcation between the SIP Trunk and the business voice network where voice quality can be measured is becoming increasingly important for partners, businesses and service providers. As with legacy TDM trunking, a point of demarcation allows partners to identify whether the issue is the responsibility of the service provider or an issue in the customer’s network. Without it, voice quality issues turn into a circus of costly finger-pointing with little access to hard data to prove responsibility and help isolate the issue.
Demarcation for SIP Trunks is a natural role for Enterprise Session Border Controllers (E-SBCs) - specifically designed for positioning at the enterprise premise (or their private cloud data center), already providing a number of important functions, including security, interoperability and survivability. Only recently has the role of voice quality monitor and demarcation with SIP Trunks been fully recognized as a primary driver for use of E-SBCs.
E-SBCs facilitate voice quality monitoring on media streams as they traverse the E-SBC, measuring jitter, dropped packets and other network statistics, and then periodically reporting statistical information to network management systems. AudioCodes Mediant E-SBCs implement Quality of Experience (QoE) measurement through embedded software, reporting the results to a centralized AudioCodes Session Experience Management (SEM) network management tool, providing visual dashboards that show network performance status and history. With the combination of AudioCodes E-SBCs and SEM, partners can improve customer visibility to voice quality, more quickly isolate and resolve issues and reduce costly finger-pointing.
Enterprise Session Border Controllers and Session Experience Management (SEM) software along with other related network elements are all part of AudioCodes’ One Voice for Lync offering, a comprehensive portfolio of voice network elements, a team of highly-experienced professional services and a global support network together from one source. By teaming with AudioCodes and leveraging One Voice for Lync, partners can be more efficient, win more deals and in the end, be more successful.
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To learn about these and other advanced Lync deployment architectures, be sure to visit AudioCodes at the upcoming Microsoft World-wide Partner Conference (WPC) in booth #222 – requesting an appointment is highly recommended.
You can learn more on the web at:
- AudioCodes web site: www.audiocodes.com/Microsoft
- The Lync Migration Resource Center: www.lyncmigration.com
- Branch-Site Resiliency Solutions article on TechNet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg398234.aspx
Continue the conversation with your comments or suggestions - Alan can be reached at alan.percy@audiocodes.com
AudioCodes, a Microsoft Communications Gold Competency partner, designs, develops and sells AudioCodes One Voice for Lync, a comprehensive portfolio of voice networking technology, professional services and global support, optimized for Microsoft Lync and Exchange Unified Communications solutions. Sold through a global network of highly-trained reseller partner community, AudioCodes One Voice for Lync simplifies the selection, implementation and support of Unified Communications. Whether deployed on-premise or in the cloud, AudioCodes is the One Source for Microsoft-certified products and services. To learn more, visit: http://www.audiocodes.com/Microsoft
