Enhance Sales and Streamline Your Customers’ Services
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), the defacto standard protocol for voice communication over IP, has been available for a while. In fact, tw telecom has offered SIP trunking for more than five years. But only recently has the industry seen a surge in adoption of this technology.
Steve LaClair, director of Managed Services for tw telecom, describes two major drivers behind the recent SIP trunking adoption.
First driver: Added capabilities and business efficiencies
Companies are looking for ways to improve communications and employee access to critical business applications, such as the integration of smartphones and tablets into the company’s IP communications network. This yields a new challenge for the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend. SIP trunking can help.
One major advantage is that the technology enables businesses to assign a number to each employee’s smartphone, so that a single phone number can be used for both the office phone and cell phone. That also means that when the employee leaves the company or moves to a different department, that same phone number can be used by the employee’s replacement.
“Smartphones are pretty much ubiquitous now,” LaClair notes, “so when we talk about unified communications, mobility is the real driver.”
Second driver: Cost savings
LaClair says customers who benefit most from Enterprise SIP Trunking are midsize to large enterprises with multiple locations. Instead of using separate voice services at each location, these customers are able to centralize their voice services to one location that supports all remote sites.
“That means they can eliminate the need for multiple bills from multiple providers, the need to house and maintain PBX equipment at each remote site, and the need for maintenance agreements with vendors and other capital costs,” LaClair says. “Switching to SIP trunking means these customers can enjoy cost reduction from several sources at once.”
A case study
As one of tw telecom‘s customers recently discovered, using Enterprise SIP Trunking for voice and data convergence over several locations offers dramatic cost savings.
This large healthcare provider in the mountain-states region has seven locations, including one headquarters, one colocation center, and five remote locations. Each location had local- and long-distance services.The company decided on a more effective combined voice and data network solution that yielded a lower total cost of ownership.
tw telecom’s Enterprise SIP Trunking created a win-win situation. The solution consolidated long-distance service and eliminated the need for local lines at each remote site. By leveraging MPLS to connect all locations for both data and VoIP, the customer realized the goal for a more cost efficient communications solution.
In the process, the customer consolidated its services. Previously, the company used services from tw telecom and another provider. Switching to tw telecom for all its services lowered the company’s total cost by over 20%.
Selling to new and existing customers
For multi-location, midsize to large businesses, tw telecom‘s Enterprise SIP Trunking service offers significant benefits. Not only can customers lower costs by centralizing their PBX, they also can add advanced telephony features over the IP network that are in high demand as the workforce becomes increasingly mobile.
And even if all of a company’s employees aren’t mobile yet, SIP trunking provides the scalable infrastructure companies need to involve mobile devices when the demand arises.
LaClair recommends that channel partners include voice services when talking to customers about data services. He also suggests going back to existing data network customers to find out what they are doing for voice services.
Meanwhile, with SIP trunking adoption increasing steadily, tw telecom is enhancing the service and has more updates planned over the next 12 months and beyond.
Enterprise SIP Trunking is yet another example of how tw telecom excels at identifying customer problems and providing efficient, cost-effective solutions. Now is a great time to offer Enterprise SIP Trunking to your new and existing customers!
